This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that touched virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. American prohibition was only part of a global phenomenon, which included pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Tomáš Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Temperance wasn’t “American exceptionalism,” but one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Temperance was intrinsically linked to progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights and indigenous rights. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F. E. W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that profited off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.