The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Author: Lisa McGirr

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0393248798

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“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

The Prohibition Era and Policing
The Prohibition Era and Policing

Author: Wesley M. Oliver

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780826521873

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A provocative history of criminal procedure, focusing on our perplexing overregulation of searches and seizures and underregulation of confessions and eyewitness accounts

Dry Manhattan
Dry Manhattan

Author: Michael A. Lerner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0674040090

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In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.

The Italian Squad
The Italian Squad

Author: Paul Moses

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-06-03

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1479814199

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The unknown inside story of the NYPD’s Italian-born detectives who fought both powerful gangsters and the deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved immigrant community The story begins in Sicily, on Friday, March 12, 1909, at 8:45 p.m. Three gunshots thundered in the night, and then a fourth. Two men fled, and investigators soon discovered who they had killed: Giuseppe Petrosino, the legendary American detective whose exploits in New York were celebrated even in Italy. The Italian Squad, by veteran New York City journalist and historian Paul Moses, explores the lives of the nationally celebrated detectives who followed in the slain Petrosino’s footsteps as leaders of the New York City investigative squad: Anthony Vachris, Charles Corrao, and Michael Fiaschetti. Drawing on new primary sources such as private diaries and city, state, and federal documents, this dramatic narrative history follows the Italian Squad across the first two decades of the twentieth century as its detectives battled increasingly powerful gangsters, political obstacles and deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved Italian immigrant community. Vachris, Corrao, and Fiaschetti became, like Petrosino, famous for meting out tough justice to criminals who comprised the “Black Hand.” Beyond trying to prevent horrific crimes—nighttime bombings in crowded tenements, kidnappings that targeted children at play, gangland shootings that killed innocent bystanders—the Italian Squad commanders hoped to persuade society of what they knew for themselves: that their fellow immigrant Italians, so often maligned, would make good American citizens. In this explosive story, Moses carefully strips away the mythology that has always enveloped the Italian Squad and offers instead a nuanced portrait of brave but flawed men who fought the good fight for their people and their city.

Street Justice
Street Justice

Author: Marilynn S. Johnson

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2004-10-31

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780807050231

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Street Justice traces the stunning history of police brutality in New York City, and the antibrutality movements that sought to eradicate it, from just after the Civil War through the present. New York's experience with police brutality dates back to the founding of the force and has shown itself in various forms ever since: From late-nineteenth-century "clubbing"-the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen with nightsticks-to the emergence of the "third degree," made notorious by gangster movies, from the violent mass-action policing of political dissidents during periods of social unrest, such as the 1930s and 1960s, to the tumultuous days following September 11. Yet throughout this varied history, the victims of police violence have remained remarkably similar: they have been predominantly poor and working class, and more often than not they have been minorities. Johnson compellingly argues that the culture of policing will only be changed when enough sustained political pressure and farsighted thinking about law enforcement is brought to bear on the problem.

Prohibition Gangsters
Prohibition Gangsters

Author: Marc Mappen

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0813561167

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Master story teller Marc Mappen applies a generational perspective to the gangsters of the Prohibition era—men born in the quarter century span from 1880 to 1905—who came to power with the Eighteenth Amendment. On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in the United States, “outlawing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” A group of young criminals from immigrant backgrounds in cities around the nation stepped forward to disobey the law of the land in order to provide alcohol to thirsty Americans. Today the names of these young men—Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Nucky Johnson—are more familiar than ever, thanks in part to such cable programs as Boardwalk Empire. Here, Mappen strips way the many myths and legends from television and movies to describe the lives these gangsters lived and the battles they fought. Placing their criminal activities within the context of the issues facing the nation, from the Great Depression, government crackdowns, and politics to sexual morality, immigration, and ethnicity, he also recounts what befell this villainous group as the decades unwound. Making use of FBI and other government files, trial transcripts, and the latest scholarship, the book provides a lively narrative of shootouts, car chases, courtroom clashes, wire tapping, and rub-outs in the roaring 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and beyond. Mappen asserts that Prohibition changed organized crime in America. Although their activities were mercenary and violent, and they often sought to kill one another, the Prohibition generation built partnerships, assigned territories, and negotiated treaties, however short lived. They were able to transform the loosely associated gangs of the pre-Prohibition era into sophisticated, complex syndicates. In doing so, they inspired an enduring icon—the gangster—in American popular culture and demonstrated the nation’s ideals of innovation and initiative. View a three minute video of Marc Mappen speaking about Prohibition Gangsters.

Testing the Elite
Testing the Elite

Author: David Wilock

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1040019978

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This volume explores the extent to which the Revolutionary period (1740–1815) impacted the faculty, students and institutional life of Yale College and how those changes shed insight into the nature of the American Revolution itself as a conservative or radical event. Throughout the eighteenth century, Yale continued a tradition of producing individuals who would perpetuate the economic and social status quo. At the same time, the institution was undergoing an evolution reflective of the broader movements in America that would persist into the era of the early republic. In order to examine Yale’s influence on those who attended, this study uses the student experience as a major source of evidence. Yale’s curriculum and culture prior to 1776 were beginning to embrace Enlightenment ideas, though not fully, and due in no small part to the petitions of students. From literary societies to student militias, there were ways for students to engage in an exchange of ideas about new courses and new modes of national government outside the classroom. The book is intended for both undergraduate and graduate students as well as general readers who are interested in the history of higher education, the American Revolutionary Era and the history of Connecticut.

Polish American History after 1939
Polish American History after 1939

Author: Joanna Wojdon

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1040031056

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This book is the second in a three-part, multi-authored study of Polish American history which aims to present the history of Polish Americans in the United States from the beginning of Polish presence on the continent to the current times, shown against a broad historical background of developments in Poland, the United States and other locations of the Polish Diaspora. According to the 2010 US Census, there are 9.5 million persons who identify themselves as Polish Americans in the United States, making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the country today. Polish Americans, or Polonia for short, has always been one of the largest immigrant and ethnic groups and the largest Slavic group in America. Despite that, common knowledge about its social and political life, culture and economy is still inadequate – in Academia and among the Polish Americans themselves. The book discusses the major themes in Polish American history, such as organizational life and the structure of the community facing subsequent waves of immigration from Poland, its leadership and political involvement in Polish and American affairs, as well as living and working conditions, and the everyday life of families and communities, their culture, ethnic identity and relations with the broadly understood American society, starting from the outbreak of World War 2 in Poland in September, 1939, and ending with the highlights of the 21st-century developments. It depicts Polish Americans’ transition from a ‘minority’ through ‘ethnic’ group to Americans who take pride in their symbolic ethnicity, maintained intentionally and manifested occasionally. This volume will be of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Polish and American History and Social and Cultural History.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Author: William J. Stuntz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0674051750

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Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.

A Heritage of Hypocrisy
A Heritage of Hypocrisy

Author: Holliston Perni

Publisher: Pleasant Mount Press, Inc.

Published: 2005-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0976748975

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In the dark says since the attack on the World Trade Center, the question that many Americans have asked is: Why? Why do 'they' hate us as they do? Is it, as our leaders would have us believe, because they hate our freedom? To understand what others find objectionable in us, we must take a long and brutally honest view of how we act, versus what we like to say about ourselves. The facts, as this book demonstrates, are incontrovertible: Our history is an unbroken progression of atrocities, betrayals of trust, and abuses of the rule of law, both to our global neighbors as well as our own citizens. Since the arrival of the first settlers, we have cheated and swindled, committed the most sweeping genocide in history (100,000,000 members of the indigenous populations), attacked civilian populations with nuclear weapons, promoted conflicts at home and abroad, supported brutal right-wing regimes, bullied those weaker than us, and performed gruesome experiments on the most defenseless of our own citizens: poor southern blacks, retarded teens, and pregnant women. These, sadly, are the facts, and are what others see when we say our proud slogans about peace and promoting democracy. But who among us is actually responsible for this ignominious state of affairs? As Perni argues, all of these iniquities can be traced to three sources: big business, fundamentalist, right-wing Christians, whom he characterizes as our own domestic Taliban, and a corrupt government that serves the corporations while manipulating the easily swayed voters.