Ebook: Prohibition's Greatest Myths

The word "prohibition" tends to conjure up images of smoky basement speakeasies, dancing flappers, and hardened gangsters bootlegging whiskey. Such stereotypes, a prominent historian recently noted in the Washington Post, confirm that Americans' "common understanding of the prohibition era is based more on folklore than fact." Popular culture has given us a very strong, and very wrong, picture of what the period was like. Prohibition's Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth about America's Anti-­Alcohol Crusade aims to correct common misperceptions with ten essays by scholars who have spent their careers studying different aspects of the era. Each contributor unravels one myth, revealing the historical evidence that supports, complicates, or refutes our long­-held beliefs about the Eighteenth Amendment. H. Paul Thompson Jr., Joe L. Coker, Lisa M. F. Andersen, and Ann Marie E. Szymanski examine the political and religious factors in early twentieth­-century...