In
Spirits of America, Burns relates that drinking was "the first national pastime," and shows how it shaped American politics and culture from the earliest colonial days. He details the transformation of alcohol from virtue to vice and back again, and how it was thought of as both scourge and medicine. He tells us how the great American thirst developed over the centuries, and how
reform movements and laws (some of which, Burns says, were "comic masterpieces of the legislator's art") sprang up to combat it. Burns brings back to life such vivid characters as
Carry A. Nation and other crusaders against drink and informs us that, in the final analysis.
Prohibition, the culmination of the reformers quest, had as much to do with politics and economics and geography as it did with spirituous beverage.
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Background Information
Prohibition was the social experiment in the abolition of the human consumption of intoxicating alcohol between 1919 and 1933.
