This book is a collection of biographies of leaders in the temperance movement: Margaret Fison, Sir Thomas Whittaker, Arthur Sherwell, Jessie Forsyth and Guy Hayler. All five of the forgotten temperance reformers were prolific writers. Recovering the lives and works of these forgotten women and men enhances our understanding of the temperance movement. This book will be of special interest for anyone interested in the lost history of social movements, academics and researchers.

One hundred twenty years ago, the Independent Order of Good Templars was the world's largest, most militant, and most evangelical organization hostile to alcoholic drink. Standing in the forefront of the international temperance movement, it was recognized worldwide as a potent social and moral force. Temperance and Racism restores the Templars, now an almost forgotten footnote in American and British social history, to a position of prominence within the temperance movement. The group's ideology of universal membership made it unique among fraternal organizations in the late nineteenth century and led to pioneering efforts on behalf of equal rights for women. Its policy toward African Americans was more ambiguous. Though a great many white Templars, especially those in Great Britain, rejected the extreme racism prevalent in the late nineteenth century, members in the American South did not. The decision to allow state lodges to rule on their membership eligibility led to the great schism of 1876-87. The break was mended only after British leaders compromised their ideals of universal brotherhood and sisterhood for the sake of the organization's international unity. Drawing on previously unused primary sources, David Fahey reveals much about racial attitudes and behavior in the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sabine N. Meyer eschews the generalities of other temperance histories to provide a close-grained story about the connections between alcohol consumption and identity in the upper Midwest. Meyer examines the ever-shifting ways that ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and place interacted with each other during the long temperance battle in Minnesota. Her deconstruction of Irish and German ethnic positioning with respect to temperance activism provides a rare interethnic history of the movement. At the same time, she shows how women engaged in temperance work as a way to form public identities and reforges the largely neglected, yet vital link between female temperance and suffrage activism. Relatedly, Meyer reflects on the continuities and changes between how the movement functioned to construct identity in the heartland versus the movement's more often studied roles in the East. She also gives a nuanced portrait of the culture clash between a comparatively reform-minded Minneapolis and dynamic anti-temperance forces in whiskey-soaked St. Paul--forces supported by government, community, and business institutions heavily invested in keeping the city wet.

This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States. Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.

This book is about alcoholic drink, political parties, and pressure groups. From the 1870s into the 1920s, excessive drinking by urban workers frightened the major political parties. They all wanted to reduce the number of public houses. It was not easy to find a way that would satisfy temperance reformers, many of them prohibitionists, and the licensed drink trade. Brewers demanded compensation when pubs were closed, but temperance reformers were vehemently opposed to this. The book highlights a prolonged struggle of vested interests and ideologies in this regard, showing that a Royal Commission in 1899 helped break the stalemate. In a controversial deal, brewers got compensation, but they had to pay for closing some of their own pubs. Later, during the First World War, the government experimented with an alternative to closing public houses, disinterested or non-commercial management, and considered State Purchase of the entire drink trade.

Drink, in the minds of antebellum temperance reformers, represented the threat of an increasingly urban, industrial world. Contrasting the drunkards' lack of restraint with their own thrift and sobriety, these members of the emerging middle class lay claim to respectability, virtue, and moral leadership. As they sought to legitimate their own authority, reformers also employed temperance literature to propagate middle-class ideas about the nature of women and their role as guardians of the home. Stories of women as innocent victims and loving saviors filled temperance literature. Ministers, novelists, and journalists portrayed wives beaten by drunken husbands; poets and songwriters extolled mothers and sisters who rescued men from demon drink. Yet a strand of misogyny also ran through temperance ideology. Denunciation of women as causes of intemperance and snares for men, and celebration of women's victimization often coexisted with a more positive assessment of women's role in the emerging middle class. Unless a woman remained vigilant, she too might succumb to drink, and reformers had very little sympathy for such a fallen angel. By examining the contradictory images of women employed by the antebellum temperance movement, Scott Martin reveals the reformers' commitment not only to social betterment but also to middle-class interests and a particular gender ideology. Martin explores the reasons why more men than women drank, the ways in which society dealt with women who neglected familial and social obligations to become drunkards, and the consequences of women's failure to eradicate male drunkenness.