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-A 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 longA -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 twentiethA -century America that led to the push for prohibition, including the temperance movement, the influences of religious conservatism and liberalism, the legislation of individual behavior, and the lingering effects of World War I. From there, several contributors analyze how the laws of prohibition were enforced. Michael Lewis discredits the idea that alcohol consumption increased during the era, while Richard F. Hamm clarifies the connections between prohibition and organized crime, and Thomas R. Pegram demonstrates that issues other than the failure of prohibition contributed to the amendment's repeal. Finally, contributors turn to prohibition's legacy. Mark Lawrence Schrad, Garrett Peck, and Bob L. Beach discuss the reach of prohibition beyond the United States, the influence of antiA -alcohol legislation on Americans' longA term drinking habits, and efforts to link prohibition with today's debates over the legalization of marijuana. Together, these essays debunk many of the myths surrounding ""the Noble Experiment,"" not only providing a more inA -depth analysis of prohibition but also allowing readers to engage more meaningfully in contemporary debates about alcohol and drug policy.

Russia is justly famous for its vodka. Today, the Russian average drinking man consumes 180 bottles of vodka a year, nearly half a bottle a day. But few people realize the enormous-and enormously destructive-role vodka has played in Russian politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Schrad reveals that almost every Russian ruler has utilized alcohol to strengthen his governing power and that virtually every major event in Russian history has been tinged with alcohol. The Tsars used alcohol to dampen dissent and exert control over their courts, while the government's monopoly over its sale has provided a crucial revenue stream for centuries. In one of the book's many remarkable insights, Schrad shows how Tsar Nicholas II's decision to ban alcohol in 1914 contributed to the 1917 revolution. After taking power, Stalin lifted the ban and once again used mandatory drinking binges to keep his subordinates divided, fearful, confused, and off balance. On such occasions, a drunken Khrushchev routinely pushed the drunken Soviet Deputy Defense Commissar Grigory Kulik into a nearby pond. Under Gorbachev the pendulum swung back the other way, but his crackdown on alcohol consumption in the 1980s backfired, exacerbating the Soviets' fiscal crisis and hastening the 1991 collapse. Today, chronic alcoholism has created a massive health crisis, and life expectancies for men have fallen to an alarmingly low 59 as a consequence. Schrad argues that Russia's storied addiction to vodka is not simply a social problem, but a symptom of a deeper sickness-autocracy. Indeed, Schrad shows that alcoholism and autocracy have gone hand-in-hand throughout Russian history. Drawing upon remarkable archival evidence and filled with colorful anecdotes of the enforced drunkenness Russian leaders imposed on their courts, Vodka Politics offers a wholly new way of understanding Russian political history.