Space and Order in Antebellum American Temperance

Taking a spatial approach to the history of alcohol and temperance in America, this book charts how temperance discourse and thought located an ‘alcoholic order’ to make the threat of alcohol appear ubiquitous and meaningful in the public sphere during the Antebellum eta. Each chapter explores a discrete space; from taverns and distilleries, to the nation state and ‘the drunkard’ body. It shows how, in engaging with social spaces, advocates conveyed a world that was dominated and ordered by alcohol’s production and consumption and infused temperance with critiques of global capitalism, slavery, nationalism, health and hygiene. Highlighting the visions and critiques of the urban, views of modernisations and connections between temperance and slavery, this book further explores the relationship between space and the expression of a ‘temperance imaginary’. In doing so it provides valuable contextualisation to the history of temperance, and the connections between temperance and 19th century social circumstances. Exploring different reform initiatives and social movements, as well as their political dynamics, Nyberg moves past how temperance organisations acted and instead asks how their thinking developed in order to transform alcohol into a threat.