Looking at the past tests and develops the values you bring to your life—including a healthy contempt for authority.
J.D. Tuccille writes:
“If I’d lived then, I’d have still gone to saloons,” Anthony, my 11-year-old son, said as we watched the Ken Burns documentary, Prohibition. “But I’d have carried a gun in case I had to deal with police or militia.”
He commented after a scene in which Portland, Maine’s Mayor Neal Dow—nicknamed “the sublime fanatic”—ordered troops in 1855 to fire on an angry crowd outside City Hall. They had gathered to protest the statewide ban on alcoholic beverages that Dow pushed through in his zeal to make the world a better place as he conceived such a thing. Like most fanatics, sublime or otherwise, the mayor didn’t have a lot of patience for disagreement. One man was killed and seven wounded that day by the forces of mandatory sobriety.
Interesting, well-produced, and drawing on multiple sources and experts, Prohibition lends itself beautifully to our homeschooling efforts. It does a thorough job of exploring the religious, reformist, and nativist roots of first the Temperance movement and then the push for full-on Prohibition. We’ve recently studied the Progressive Era and the fight for women’s suffrage, and the documentary pulls in those histories, showing how social movements influence one another and often come together to achieve common goals—sometimes good, and other times leading to disastrous exercises in self-righteous presumption like Prohibition.
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