From bootleggers to temperance workers, you can step back in time at the Durham Museum's new exhibit: American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
The exhibit, on display through January is the first comprehensive exhibition about prohibition, "America’s most colorful and complex constitutional hiccup," as they call it. The display takes visitors through Prohibition and what came before, during, and after it.
You can see one of a kind rare artifacts like:
-The original ratification copies of the 18th and 21st Amendments
-A hatchet used by Carry Nation during one of her barroom-smashing raids
-A Prohibition Bureau Badge issued by the Department of Justice in 1931
-Temperance propaganda, including pamphlets, school lesson manuals, speeches, and hymnals
-The phone used by Roy Olmstead, the defendant in the landmark Olmstead v. United States wiretapping case, to run his bootlegging empire
-Flapper dresses, cocktail couture, and other women’s and men’s fashion accessories from the 1920s
-Original home manufacturing items used for making homebrewed beer and moonshine
-Prohibition agent Eliot Ness’ signed oath of office from 1926 in which he swore to “support and defend the Constitution”
-Al Capone’s guilty verdict from his 1931 conviction in Chicago
-One of the first crates of Budweiser produced after the “Beer Act,” which passed in April 1933
There's also interactive elements and immersive environments with the sights, sounds, and experiences of the time period. American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is curated by Daniel Okrent, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
KMTV is a proud sponsor of the exhibit.
