And the blurbs are...

"Prohibition Is Here to Stay"
The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America
Jason S. Lantzer

"Jason Lantzer's excellent biography of Edward Shumaker places one of America's most successful Prohibition crusaders in the very center of American religion and reform. Lantzer's careful research and thoughtful analysis sharply contradicts the tendency to see Prohibition as a mere sidebar to American history and opens our minds to the connections between political activism and religious faith." -James H. Madison, author of Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II

"Given Lantzer's access to Edward Shumaker's personal papers, his narrative of Shumaker's life is undoubtedly an authoritative one. In addition, the book increases our understanding of the organizational dynamics of the Indiana prohibition movement, the Indiana Anti-Saloon League (IASL)'s political endeavors, and the IASL's relationship with African Americans, Catholics, and the Ku Klux Klan." -Ann-Marie Szymanski, University of Oklahoma

"In this sympathetic, serious account of Reverend Edward Shumaker and the Indiana prohibition movement, Jason Lantzer brings to life an earlier, formative phase in what Americans have ruefully come to call the 'culture wars,' in which ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions within communities can give rise to and perpetuate rancorous conflicts over standards and behavior. While that story is important enough, Lantzer also evokes the atmosphere and life of Indiana's cities and small towns as the Midwest struggled with the powerful, sometimes frightening forces of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Lantzer's book is worth reading because of its imaginative re-creation of the social and intellectual environment out of which evangelical, moral reform efforts such as Shumaker's prohibitionism grew." -Alan Lessoff, editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

"Based on newly opened manuscripts and impressive research in local sources, this study of Edward Shumaker sheds new light on the workings of a state Anti-Saloon League, its leader, and state and national politics and public policy." -K. Austin Kerr, Ohio State University

Jason S. Lantzer is an adjunct history faculty member of Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, and Butler University.