Prohibition: A Battle in America's Last Culture War

The extraordinary effort to ban drink must be understood as part of an American culture war, one framed between the country and the city, between the native-born (white Protestants) and foreign-born (Catholics and Jews), between religion and science, between homogeneity and cosmopolitanism, and, of course, between 'drys' and 'wets'. The lecture will show how Prohibition animated combatants on both sides, generating two Americas that were barely comprehensible to each other, and how the truc...