When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.
Alcohol-and alcoholism-have long been prominent features in Russian life and culture. But as Mark Schrad vividly shows in Vodka Politics, it has also been central to Russian politics. Not simply a chronicle of drinking in Russia, this book shows how alcohol has been a key shaping force in Russian political history.
In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, Schrad utilizes an institutionalist approach and focuses in particular on the United States, Sweden, and Russia/the USSR. Conventional wisdom, based largely on the U.S. experience, blames evangelical zealots for the success of the temperance movement. Yet as Schrad shows, ten countries, along with numerous colonial possessions, enacted prohibition laws. In virtually every case, the consequences were disastrous, and in every country the law was ultimately repealed. Schrad concentrates on the dynamic interaction of ideas and political institutions, tracing the process through which concepts of dubious merit gain momentum and achieve credibility as they wend their way through institutional structures. He also shows that national policy and institutional environments count: the policy may have been broadly adopted, but countries dealt with the issue in different ways. While The Political Power of Bad Ideas focuses on one legendary episode, its argument about how and why bad policies achieve legitimacy applies far more broadly. It also extends beyond the simplistic notion that "ideas matter" to show how they influence institutional contexts and interact with a nation's political actors, institutions, and policy dynamics.
When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.
Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself-a history that is drenched in liquor. Scrutinizing (rather than dismissing) the role of alcohol in Russian politics yields a more nuanced understanding of Russian history itself: from palace intrigues under the tsars to the drunken antics of Soviet and post-Soviet leadership, vodka is there in abundance. Beyond vivid anecdotes, Schrad scours original documents and archival evidence to answer provocative historical questions. How have Russia's rulers used alcohol to solidify their autocratic rule? What role did alcohol play in tsarist coups? Was Nicholas II's ill-fated prohibition a catalyst for the Bolshevik Revolution? Could the Soviet Union have become a world power without liquor? How did vodka politics contribute to the collapse of both communism and public health in the 1990s? How can the Kremlin overcome vodka's hurdles to produce greater social well-being, prosperity, and democracy into the future? Viewing Russian history through the bottom of the vodka bottle helps us to understand why the "liquor question" remains important to Russian high politics even today-almost a century after the issue had been put to bed in most every other modern state. Indeed, recognizing and confronting vodka's devastating political legacies may be the greatest political challenge for this generation of Russia's leadership, as well as the next.
In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, Schrad utilizes an institutionalist approach and focuses in particular on the United States, Sweden, and Russia/the USSR. Conventional wisdom, based largely on the U.S. experience, blames evangelical zealots for the success of the temperance movement. Yet as Schrad shows, ten countries, along with numerous colonial possessions, enacted prohibition laws. In virtually every case, the consequences were disastrous, and in every country the law was ultimately repealed. Schrad concentrates on the dynamic interaction of ideas and political institutions, tracing the process through which concepts of dubious merit gain momentum and achieve credibility as they wend their way through institutional structures. He also shows that national policy and institutional environments count: the policy may have been broadly adopted, but countries dealt with the issue in different ways. While The Political Power of Bad Ideas focuses on one legendary episode, its argument about how and why bad policies achieve legitimacy applies far more broadly. It also extends beyond the simplistic notion that "ideas matter" to show how they influence institutional contexts and interact with a nation's political actors, institutions, and policy dynamics.
From the internationally bestselling author of The Etymologicon, a lively and fascinating exploration of how, throughout history, each civilization has found a way to celebrate, or to control, the eternal human drive to get sloshed “An entertaining bar hop though the past 10,000 years.”—The New York Times Book Review Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there’s drink there’s drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors, or a way of marking the end of a day’s work. It can send you to sleep, or send you into battle. Making stops all over the world, A Short History of Drunkenness traces humankind’s love affair with booze from our primate ancestors through to the twentieth century, answering every possible question along the way: What did people drink? How much? Who did the drinking? Of the many possible reasons, why? On the way, learn about the Neolithic Shamans, who drank to communicate with the spirit world (no pun intended), marvel at how Greeks got giddy and Sumerians got sauced, and find out how bars in the Wild West were never quite like in the movies. This is a history of the world at its inebriated best.
A new history of the Russian Revolution, exploring how people experienced it in their own lives, from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921. The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 focuses on human experience to address key issues of inequality, power, and violence, and ideas of justice and freedom.
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