This article examines a cohort of post–World War II temperance activists who attempted to legally curtail the circulation of advertisements for liquor, wine, and beer. These activists, who were primarily associated with Protestant church and lay organizations, pressured lawmakers to hold multiple Senate hearings for a series of bills that would prevent any media bearing enticements to purchase alcoholic beverages from moving across state lines. The proposed legislation not only threatened the growth of alcoholic beverage industries, it also took aim at the media makers and advertising firms that endorsed and benefited from the sale of liquor, wine, and beer. This article explores the under-studied archives of the mid-century temperance movement—including the transcripts of their Senate hearings, the minutes of their organizing meetings, the mail they sent to media makers, and their published pamphlets—to illuminate their antagonistic approach to the ballooning world of mass media. I argue that efforts to censure liquor advertising were efforts to discipline and censure the communications industry elites whose products increasingly defined daily life. While many histories describe the Christian actors who took mass media by storm, this article highlights those who situated themselves as a moral check on the perceived excesses of mid-century mass culture.

This article investigates the sonic and spatial properties of “evangelical” experience in the eighteenth-century South. Utilizing an array of manuscript letters and diaries, I argue that, while scholars have explained the intellectual convictions responsible for Southern revivalists’ democratic impulse, we must also acknowledge the equally formative role of space and sound. By highlighting how upper-crust whites racialized space and sound in the unawakened South, this article shows that, as revivalists popularized loud, open-air practices, they actively redefined Christian experience in spaces and sounds long-defined as Indian, Black, and lower-class. In doing so, New Lights couched their movement in a radically new sensorium that distinguished them from entrenched ecclesial bodies and empowered would-be followers to, as the South Carolina Baptist Edmund Botsford put it, “think & act for your selves.”

Starting in 1960, ski resorts in the American West invited American Indian dancers to perform snow dances to address low snowfall. The first documented snow dance was associated with the 1960 Winter Olympics at Lake Tahoe, and snow dances have occurred throughout the twenty-first century, including a 2012 dance at the Vail Ski Resort. In most instances, ski resorts declare the dance successful when snow falls. These snow dances and the related rain dances are best understood in the context of white tourism to the American West and its settler-colonial legacy. I argue that these weather dances are the products of a dynamic relationship between white-owned businesses and American Indian performers in the arid American West, and they have produced racialized ideas of the “sacred”—specifically, an authentic experience that connects settler-colonists to the natural world, facilitated through American Indian spiritual practices. This connection often increases the profitability of businesses that exploit the natural world but also provides an opportunity to express Indigenous communicative agency. I situate the settler-colonial notion of the sacred alongside Indigenous ritual practice, entrepreneurship, and self-determination, using newspapers and anthropological reports.