This title traces the origins of prohibition back to the evangelical-based voluntary abstinence temperance movement in the early 1800s. It makes clear that public support for prohibition collapsed due to gangster violence and the need for local, state, and federal government alcohol revenue during the Great Depression. Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, but from 1920 to 1933 the country went dry. After decades of pressure from rural Protestants, the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution meaning alcohol could no longer be produced, imported, transported, or sold. How and why did prohibition come about? How did it work? And how did prohibition give way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol?

Drinking and temperance -- The dry crusade -- Prohibition -- Repeal -- Legacies.