Alcohol and Drugs History Society

Georgia's local option law of 1885 (article)

Michael A. Wagner, "'As Gold is Tried in the Fire, so Hearts Must be Tried by Pain': The Temperance Movement in Georgia and the Local Option Law of 1885," Georgia Historical Quarterly 93/1 (2009): 30-54.

Black women, prohibition, and the election of 1928 (article)

 Lisa G. Materson, "African American Women, Prohibition, and the 1928 Presidential Election," Journal of Women's History 21/1 (2009): 63-86.

Speakeasy nostalgia in big cities

The New York Times reports on the nostalgia for prohibition-era speakeasies that has produced imitation speakeasies in major cities, especially in New York City.  From the outside, it is hard to know that these legal drinking places are bars that sell alcoholic drinks.  Mixed into the story are bits of history about the real speakeasies and the drinks that they served, often horrid and sometimes deadly.  For more, see here.

Obama's Supreme Court Nominee ruled against Out-of-State Wine Shippers and got overturned

Click here for the article on Tom Wark's Fermentation, The Daily Wine Blog.

Vice and the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic drink in the United States (book)

Mara L. Keire, For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933 (Johns Hopkins UP, forthcoming 2010).

The 5th International Conference on the History of Drugs and Alcohol: The Pathways to Prohibition

The 5th International Conference on the History of Drugs and Alcohol: The Pathways to Prohibition,

26-28th June 2009, CSHHH, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland

When John Shanks acquired the Barrhead pottery company to establish his “sanitary engineering workshop” in the late nineteenth century, the decision was more than a simple business one. The man who was to become the President of the Barrhead Evangelist Association chose the town, which bordered Glasgow, as it had the reputation of having the highest number of pubs per head of population. Workers had to sign the temperance pledge to ensure employment. Shanks was following in the footsteps of temperance campaigner Sir William Collins, Glasgow book publisher and Lord Provost who earned the nickname “Water Willie”. In Britain, however, the impact of such campaigners remained local, and only those who adopted the global/colonial platform against intoxicants met with success. Such limited influence paved the ground for the British anti-intoxicant policy of the twentieth century which rejected prohibition for the medical solution, ultimately another localised response to local problems. The conference is seeking papers on the broad subject of the ‘pathways to prohibition’, the underlying motives governing policy and reactions to policymaking across the globe. Proposed papers or panels can be on any topic in the history of drugs and alcohol, but some issues to be considered include the ways in which the cultures of consumption evolved to meet the challenge of prohibition; the impact upon previously good citizens, including distillers and brewers, whose activities were now criminalised; the changing images of consumption under prohibition policies; the construction of consumption which underlay decisions to instigate prohibition or reject it; the effectiveness of the merging of local initiatives with national and international politics of prohibition.

Abstracts of proposed papers (no more than 500 words long) or of proposed panels should be sent by email, fax or post by November 15th 2008 to Dr Patricia Barton CSHHH Dept of History University of Strathclyde 16 Richmond Street Glasgow G1 1XQ Scotland E: p.barton@strath.ac.uk Tel: 44 (0)141 548 2932/ Fax: 44 (0)141 552 8509

Prohibition in 1850s New Brunswick (article)

Greg Marquis, "Contesting Prohibition and the Constitution in 1850s New Brunswick," in Hamar Foster, A. R. Buck, Benjamin L. Berger, eds, The grand experiment: law and legal culture in British settler societies [Law and Society] (Vancouver: published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History by UBC Press, 2008): 221-39.

Prohibition in the United States (book)

John M. Dunn, ed., Prohibition (Lucent, forthcoming 2009).  For young people.

Southern white evangelicals and prohibition (book reviews)

Book reviews of Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement, by Barclay Key in Alabama Review 62/1 (January 2009): 63-65; and Arthur Remillard, in Church History 77/4 (December 2008): 1090-1093. 

Prohibition in New Zealand and the myth of 1919 (article)

Paul Christoffel, "Prohibition and the Myth of 1919," New Zealand Journal of History 42/2 (Oct. 2008): 154-175.