A most stirring and significant episode

the long version

A Most Stirring and Significant Episode is the first book-length study of African American involvement in the 19th-century temperance movement, but it is much more than that. Unlike any previous work, it challenges the reader to interpret blacks' temperance rhetoric and response to prohibition in light of key elements of African and African American cosmology. As a study in the social history of ideas, it argues that 19th-century temperance ideology emerged from and reinforced widely held religiocultural values, and as such it was able to transcend the nation's yawning racial, regional, and chronological divides. - Jacket flap.