Thousands of years ago, before Christ or Buddha or Muhammad, before democracy or industry or technology as we know the terms today, before the Roman Empire rose or the Colossus of Rhodes fell, before water wheels or paddle wheel boats, before decimals or compasses, before the first dice were rolled or the first sheet music was carved into a cuneiform tablet, before sundials were invented or silver coins minted or stone bridges built across rivers—before any of this happened and before most of it was even a flash in the minds of madmen, there were people in Asia Minor...

We read in our histories that the Revolutionary War was conceived in the watering holes of colonial America, but almost as an aside, and we never ask why.

Why did New York merchants gather at Burns’s Tavern on Broadway to plan a boycott of British goods in response to the Stamp Act?

Why did Bostonians organize their tea party at the Green Dragon Tavern?

Why did Virginia’s Committee of Correspondence, and later the Intercolonial Committees, conduct their insurrectionary business at the Sir Walter Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg?

Why did Samuel Adams and John Hancock and their friends fan the flames...

It was early in the colonial experiment, probably 1622, when the London Company, which held the charter for Virginia, told Governor Francis Wyatt that there was too much boozing going on in his jurisdiction. It was a stain on the reputation of both colony and company, an “infamy [that] hath spread itself to all that have heard the name of Virginia.” The members of the company were embarrassed. Not only that, they were angry. They demanded “speedie redress.”

This is the first known plea for a change in American drinking habits—the first, at least, from an official body as...

It is a tale that the popular historians believe and the academic historians suspect, and the latter, claiming there is little evidence and nothing that can be proven beyond doubt, are probably right. But this author has decided to tell it anyhow, for two reasons. First, the characters, at least, are real. Second, there are fictions that make up for the inaccuracy of their details by the truth of their general impressions; they are like novels whose inventiveness renders an era as effectively, in its own way, as do the diaries and data and journalism of the period. The story...

Robert E. Lee surrendered to an apparently sober Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The following year, a group of reformers called the Sons of Temperance changed their membership requirements and admitted daughters. The year after that, the women outnumbered the men.

Before long, the same was true in other societies, and then new societies came into being, one right after the other, made up entirely of women. They were old and young, rich and poor, educated and unlettered—in the aftermath of the Civil War, females poured into the temperance movement as if...

The Women’s Crusade was a series of brush fires, frightening in intensity but quickly extinguished. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, on the other hand, was a carefully orchestrated conflagration—and it was the American public schools that took most of the heat.

Woman’s, as the group liked to point out in its early literature, “because they felt that if men had an equal place in its councils their greater knowledge of Parliamentary usage, and their more aggressive nature would soon place women in the background, and deprive them of the power of learning by experience.”

Christian, despite the occasional reservation...

It is not easy to tell the truth about a legend. It is not easy toknowthe truth. Some of what has been written is falsehood and some is hyperbole and some is verifiable fact, and it can be difficult to distinguish among them. A legend serves the same purpose to those who chronicle it as a manikin does to a clothing designer; it provides a frame upon which the individual drapes his own materials for his own purposes, satisfying both himself and the marketplace. The goal is not accuracy so much as an eye-catching appearance.

This is especially...

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, women were losing control. They were falling back to the periphery of the temperance movement, becoming second-class citizens for a second time. They had had their day, had tried their methods, had fallen short of their goals. The public schools were still teaching WCTU lessons, but not enough people seemed to be heeding them; national prohibition was no closer to reality than it had ever been, and state and local legislators seemed to be repealing antibooze bills as often as they were passing them, finding that it was too much trouble to make them work.

More important,...

Pussyfoot Johnson was looking forward to the new law. “This is a big moment for me,” he said, after exaggerating his own role in bringing it about, “because from this day the flag of my country will no longer float over any brewery or distillery.”

The Reverend Billy Sunday, one-time major league baseball player turned evangelist, was looking forward to the new law. “The reign of tears is over,” he told the faithful, his voice soaring even more than it usually did when moved by the Spirit. “The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into...

In 1924, a revolutionary named Plutarco Elias Calles became president of Mexico. A former army general with a quick temper and a fondness for imposing his will on others, a thoughtful man but in a primitive, sometimes vicious kind of way, Calles “brutalized the Church, repressed the Left,” and committed various other offenses against various other political opponents. He was also hell on drinkers. Several years earlier, as governor of the state of Sonora, he had had to enforce a ban on alcoholic beverages, and did so with remarkable effectiveness. The liquor interests went out of business; very few bootleggers...

“There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment,” said its co-sponsor, Senator Morris Shepard, Democrat from Texas, speaking on the record and for the ages and not acknowledging the fact that, by putting up a still on his property, he had already enacted his own, personal repeal, “as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”

A year and a half after Prohibition began, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution followed it into law. It ended a decades-long struggle that never should have been necessary in the...

The years went by in fits and starts, and Americans turned their attention to matters other than the satisfying of thirst. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down in Texas, Ma Barker in Florida, and John Dillinger outside a theater in Chicago. Adolf Hitler denounced the Treaty of Versailles and decided that he was the man to right its wrongs; so did a lot of his countrymen. Dust storms swept the Midwest, and they might have been the worst ever, forcing thousands of farm families to pack up their possessions and...