ABSTRACT
Before the 1970’s, the temperance movement received little attention from historians, who largely dismissed it as, in the words of Richard Hofstadter, “a pseudo-reform, a pinched parochial substitute for reform.”1 Hofstadter’s assessment was despite the fact that temperance was the largest and longest-sustained reform effort of the nineteenth century and culminated in an amendment to the Constitution. But beginning in the early 1970’s, scholars altered their perceptions. Temperance began to take its place alongside abolitionism and women’s rights as a legitimate reform and one that could perhaps tell historians the most about the time in which it thrived. Scholars shed light on the movement’s inner workings and the motivations of its membership, as well as its relationship to the larger culture-an America becoming an industrialized, urbanized nation with a sizable middle class. Yet despite the increased attention temperance has received in the last three decades, historians have not exhausted its potential as a tool for understanding nineteenth-century American culture, nor have they mastered the intricacies of the reform as a movement and an ideology. Temperance historiography has not yet been adequately synthesized with the most recent trends in historical inquiry, nor has the movement itself been properly and fully situated within the social and intellectual history of the nineteenth century.
