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When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. 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 phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Masaryk, Kemal Ataturk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't American exceptionalism at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. 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 Americans have been led to believe.

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Mark Lawrence Schrad is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University. His book Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State has been translated into Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and Chinese. He is also the author of The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave. Tom Perkins is one of Silicon Valley's pioneers. His venture capital firm has financed many famous companies, including Genentech, Compaq, Amazon, AOL, and Google. Perkins lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has a medieval manor house, complete with moat, in East Sussex, England.

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