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 affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculia...

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...

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreakin...

In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, ...

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretchi...

As the world struggles to confront a bolder Russia, the importance of understanding the formidable and ambitious Vladimir Putin has never been greater. This gripping narrative of Putin's rise to power recounts Putin's origins—from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad to his ascent through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule in the Kremlin.On the one hand, Putin's many domestic reforms—from tax cuts to an expansion of property rights...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal)On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was li...

**WINNER OF THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR OPINION WRITINGWINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTIONWINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD**The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces t...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain."With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in...

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages, major cities were soon in the gri...

Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also develop...

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Soviet republic Ukraine has struggled against its giant neighbor to the north”-Russia- to maintain its sovereignty. In early 2014 tensions turned to conflict as Vladimir Putin, determined to keep Ukraine from forging stronger ties with the West, seized Crimea and fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine. In the latest Brookings essay, Chrystia Freeland, a former Ukrainian-based reporter with strong family ties to the country, offers a pers...