The United States was the largest country ever to experiment with national Prohibition, so it should be no surprise that in the United States most of the books on the history of drink deal with temperance reform. A good starting point is W. J. Rorabaugh’s Prohibition: A Concise History. Other books that offer expansive histories of America’s Nobel Experiment include Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent; The War on Wine: Prohibition, Neoprohibition, and American Culture, by Victor W. Geraci; and Prohibition’s Greatest Myths, edited by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm. These volumes effectively chart the emergence and rise of anti-alcohol culture across the United States.
Advocates for Prohibition argued that it was most needed in New York City, the nation’s most vibrant metropolis. Michael A. Lerner examines Prohibition’s impact in massively transforming the culture of the city in Dry Manhattan.
Offering a nation-wide study of one religious community’s specific relationship to alcohol, Marni Davis uncovers how Prohibition altered this connection among the Jewish community in Jews and Booze, even detailing how it shifted their civic and communal identities.
Turning to Prohibition in the South, readers will notice that race and religion are two prominent themes. H. Paul Thompson, Jr. considers the religious dimension underpinning the temperance movement in A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865–1887. Focusing on the largest city at the time to ban alcohol, he delves into African Americans’ prominent role in pushing for temperance in the South. As Brendan Payne demonstrates in Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, however, temperance was later embraced by white Christians to disenfranchise Black voters. Elaborating on how evangelicals viewed alcohol as the root cause of all social ills, Joe L. Coker examines how their religious framing was used to separate Prohibition from the temperance movement in the North and appeal to southerners by playing into racist stereotypes in Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause.
Of course, Prohibition was not always welcomed in southern states. Bruce E. Stewart’s Moonshiners and Prohibitionists details the tensions over Prohibition in southern Appalachia and how temperance impeded local cultures from brewing homemade liquor. In his case study of South Carolina, The Coming of Southern Prohibition, Michael Lewis examines the unique case of South Carolina’s dispensary system, which delayed the Noble Experiment from reaching that state by about a decade.
Many women were significant drivers of temperance efforts. Christopher H. Evans considers one such notable woman in Do Everything, a biography of nineteenth-century temperance reformer Frances Willard and her commitment to protecting the sanctity of motherhood and the home from men who squandered family resources on alcohol and abused their families while drunk. Holly Fletcher’s Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century takes a more expansive view, considering the shift toward more women leading the movement, as well as the archetypal roles of both the self-made man and the crusading woman in driving the discourse. Scott C. Martin’s Devil of the Domestic Sphere examines how the antebellum temperance movement used a diversity of stories and images of women, sometimes in conflicting roles, to underscore the need for temperance. Similarly, in Manhood Lost Elaine Frantz Parsons studies the frequently employed narrative of men falling victim to alcohol and needing to be saved by the intervention of Prohibition, led by morally virtuous women. Although much has been written about alcoholism within Native American communities, Thomas J. Lappas considers Native American women’s efforts to join temperance reform efforts in his monograph In League against King Alcohol. Izumi Ishii’s Bad Fruits of the Civilized Tree considers the importance of alcohol to the Cherokee Nation, from the time of European contact to the early twentieth century, detailing the tribe’s interactions with temperance.
Readers may also wish to understand the political and social tactics of how the temperance movement operated. Lisa M. F. Andersen outlines the history of the Prohibition Party in American politics in The Politics of Prohibition. As she shows, the restrictiveness of American party politics eventually pushed party members to pursue alternative channels for their activism. One tactic was to devise popular songs. Edited by P. D. Sanders, Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement details the role of music in the temperance movement and compiles hundreds of lyrics to songs the movement produced. Two studies investigate temperance through the lenses of advertising and public relations. Margot Opdyke Lamme’s Public Relations and Religion in American History covers the role of evangelism in the development of public relations with the aim of pushing temperance, spanning the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Following the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, temperance reformers could no longer champion wholesale bans on alcohol. As Pamela E. Pennock details in Advertising Sin and Sickness, in the latter half of the twentieth century these reformers instead focused their efforts on regulating the marketing of alcohol and tobacco.
Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century by 
Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement by 
Public Relations and Religion in American History by 
