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Definition: Prohibition from Philip's Encyclopedia

(1919-33) Period in US history when the government prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic drinks.The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, confirmed by the Volstead Act (1919), brought in Prohibition. It failed due to smuggling, illicit manufacture, corruption of officials and police, and the growth of organized crime financed by bootlegging. The 21st Amendment (1933) repealed Prohibition.


Prohibition

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
Prohibition began in the United States in 1920 when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution took effect. The era that it ushered in lasted until 1933, when special conventions in three-fourths of the states repealed prohibition. Officially, prohibition refers to the outlawing of all manufacturing and sales of alcohol in the United States. Although there was widespread opposition to the ban, most Americans did obey the law; estimates indicate that alcoholic consumption was cut by over fifty percent. It seems inevitable that people will seek to ban the bad habits of others. Certainly, there was cause for concern regarding the high consumption of alcohol in the United States and its effects on individuals and families. By all accounts, alcoholism was a serious problem in America, and people sought solutions for it. Temperance movements seeking to stop the consumption of alcohol were part of a wider movement seeking to regulate morals in the direction assumed most beneficial to others…
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Full text Article Prohibition

From World of Criminal Justice, Gale
Prohibition is the popular name for the period in U.S. history from 1920 to 1933 when the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages were illegal . When the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, they gave Congress the authority to regulate and even ban intoxicating liquors. This is the…
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Full text Article Prohibition

From The Great American History Fact-Finder
The forbidding of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquors in the United States, usually associated with the period 1920–33. Following decades of temperance activities, Congress in 1919 approved the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banning alcohol and adopted the…
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Full text Article Prohibition

From Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable
The prevention by law of the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1919 to 1933. The legislation ultimately arose out of the intense religious revivalism of the 1820s and 1830s but was more immediately aimed at improving efficiency in the workplace and reducing the level of…
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Full text Article prohibition

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
legal prevention of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, the extreme of the regulatory liquor laws . The modern movement for prohibition had its main growth in the United States and developed largely as a result of the agitation of 19th-century temperance movements . …
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Full text Article Prohibition

From Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1921...
Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, was a 13-year period during which alcohol was outlawed in the United States. Organized opposition to alcohol had long existed in the United States, and various state and local laws had limited its consumption since the nineteenth century. But when the…
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Full text Article Prohibition

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
Wood engraving. "The Ohio Whiskey War – the...
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Full text Article Prohibition

From American Governance
©LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS...
From its beginnings in the 1820s through its demise in the 1930s, the prohibition of alcohol, and the temperance movement that inspired it, had important effects on American governance. Because of the federalism of the American system, and the decentralized structure of the temperance movement, the…
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Full text Article Prohibition

From Encyclopedia of American Literature Full text Article Volume 3
During the Prohibition period the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the production, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages in the United States. It was enacted as a result of pressure from women's groups and religious organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon…
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1919–1933 A century of antialcohol agitation paid off in the early 20th century when the United States and most Canadian provinces passed laws against the sale and use of alcoholic beverages ranging from weak beer to high-proof whiskey. Enacted in the aftermath of World War I, the United States’ …
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Full text Article Prohibition

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
In US history, the period 1920–33 when the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was in force, and the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol was illegal. This led to bootlegging (the illegal distribution of liquor, often illicitly distilled), to the financial advantage of organized…
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