This unit introduces the early-nineteenth-century campaign against alcohol consumption through a selection of primary sources created to convince Americans to stop drinking. By examining these sources, strategies of the temperance movement, you will discover how reformers hoped to change American society. What do the strategies of the antebellum temperance movement reveal about how reformers hoped to change American society? The sources in this unit will allow you to examine the values that led thousands of Americans to devote themselves to eliminate alcohol consumption. By evaluating the effect that the temperance movement had on its audience, you will draw some conclusions about the movement’s impact on society. Throughout the unit, you will learn to read documents as historians do, looking not only for the information a work provides, but also for the values and cultural assumptions that lie beneath the surface. Ultimately, by investigating the sometimes unusual ways that antebellum Americans confronted the problem of alcoholism—a problem still with us today—you will learn to appreciate that the past is simultaneously familiar and foreign.