The temperance movement is a social movement promoting temperance or total abstinence from consumption of alcoholic beverages. Participants in the movement typically criticize alcohol intoxication or promote teetotalism , and its leaders emphasize alcohol 's negative effects on people's health , personalities, and family lives. Typically the movement promotes alcohol education and it also demands the passage of new laws against the sale of alcohol : either regulations on the availability of alcohol, or the prohibition of it.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the temperance movement became prominent in many countries, particularly in English-speaking, Scandinavian, and majority Protestant ones, and it eventually led to national prohibitions in Canada to , Norway spirits only from to , Finland to , and the United States to , as well as provincial prohibition in India to present. A number of temperance organizations promote temperance. In late 17th-century North America, alcohol was a vital part of colonial life as a beverage, medicine, and commodity for men, women, and children.
Drinking was widely accepted and completely integrated into society; however, drunkenness was not tolerated. In the colonial period of America from around , when a Plymouth minister named William Blackstone began distributing apples and flowers, up until the mids, hard cider was the primary alcoholic drink of the people. Hard cider was prominent throughout this entire period and nothing compared in scope or availability. It was one of the few aspects of American culture that all the colonies shared.
Settlement along the frontier often included a legal requirement whereby an orchard of mature apple trees bearing fruit within three years of settlement were required before a land title was officially granted. For example, The Ohio Company required settlers to plant not less than fifty apple trees and twenty peach trees within three years.
These plantings guaranteed land titles. In , the average New England family was consuming seven barrels of hard cider annually, which equates to about gallons per person. Around the mids, newly arrived immigrants from Germany and elsewhere increased beer's popularity, and the temperance movement and continued westward expansion caused farmers to abandon their cider orchards.
