David Fahey just posted a notice of my forthcoming book, Battling Demon Rum:  Th
e Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933, and kindly invited me to describe
its contents to the members of the ATHG listserv.  The book (due out in August
or September) is part of Ivan Dee's American Ways series--as such, it is a
compact, readable survey intended for classroom use.  I also hope that
scholars will find it useful.  I approach the history of temperance and
prohibition in the U.S. as a political historian (I have published on the
Anti-Saloon League) who has been influenced by the work of social historians.
My special interest was in examining the place of drinking and temperance
in popular views of democracy and citizenship; the function of gender--the
male culture of public drinking/the formal exclusion of women from the
political system that regulated drinking--and ethnicity in the public
debate over alcohol restriction; the tension between insistent moral
reformers and political parties which sought to evade the divisive liquor
question; and the rise and fall of state prohibition in the 1850s and
national prohibition in the early twentieth century.  Jack Blocker's
outstanding 1989 survey explored many of these themes--I hope I have done
justice to his insights by bringing more recent scholarship (especially
in political history) to bear on the struggle for a dry America.
Tom Pegra
Tom Pegram
Loyola College
e-mail:  [log in to unmask]