The War on Alcohol, Lisa McGirr
The War on Alcohol, Lisa McGirr
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The War on Alcohol
Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Author: Lisa McGirr

Narrator: Donna Postel

Unabridged: 11 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/30/2021


Synopsis

Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes.

This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny.


About Lisa McGirr

Lisa McGirr is professor of history at Harvard University. She is the author of The War on Alcohol and an award-winning history of the new right, Suburban Warriors. She and her family live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kat

Another book I read for school but this could definitely be read by anyone interested in this subject. It's well-researched and well-written. It's probably not the most entertaining read; it's very information-heavy and repetitive at times. However, if you're interested in prohibition, this is a goo......more

Goodreads review by Bob

Lisa McGirr's socio-political take on Prohibition and its aftermath is an informative, if a bit academic, take on an American movement that was hugely popular until the reality set in. No one really expected the Volstead Act to be responsible for a federal income tax, the rise of the KKK, the mass i......more

Goodreads review by Damian

How did a country built on the proposition that all men are endowed with the unalienable right to liberty, end up with a constitutional amendment banning the drink? Several causes jump off the pages of Lisa McGirr's The War on Alcohol. She takes the reader through the intersection of political coalit......more