In League Against King Alcohol

In League Against King Alcohol
Author: Thomas J. Lappas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806166630

Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in In League Against King Alcohol. Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. His work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s work places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century.

Religious Books, 1876-1982

Religious Books, 1876-1982
Author: R.R. Bowker Company. Department of Bibliography
Publisher: New York : Bowker
Total Pages: 1328
Release: 1983
Genre: Reference
ISBN:

"Prepared by the R.R. Bowker Company's Department of Bibliography in collaboration with the Publications Systems Department"--Page opposite t.p. Includes indexes. Author Index ... 3901-4069 Title Index ... 4071-4389.