Nathaniel Currier in the context of "Moralism"

Moralism is a philosophy that arose in the 19th century that concerns itself with imbuing society with a certain set of morals, usually traditional behaviour, but also "justice, freedom, and equality". It has strongly affected North American and British culture, concerning private issues such as the family unit and sexuality, as well as issues that carry over into the public square, such as the temperance movement.

The term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe the attitude of "being overly concerned with making moral judgments or being illiberal in the judgments one makes".

The Drunkard's Progress: From the First Glass to the Grave is an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier. It is a nine-step lebenstreppe on a stone arch depicting a man's journey through alcoholism. Through a series of vignettes it shows how a single drink starts an arc that ends in suicide. Below the structure, the protagonist's wife and child stand in tears.

The lithograph is based on John Warner Barber's 1826 work The Drunkard's Progress, or The Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin. Critical reception has been poor since the image was released, but it influenced other temperance-themed works. The Drunkard's Progress is used in high school American history classes to teach about the temperance movement.

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 (1918 to 1920), Norway (spirits only, from 1919 to 1926), Finland (1919 to 1932), and the United States (1920 to 1933), as well as some provinces in India (1948 to present). A number of temperance organizations promote temperance.

A Lebenstreppe or Stufenalter (German: "steps of life" or "stages of life") is a pictorial representation of the human life as a series of ascending and descending steps. The tradition began in fifteenth-century Europe and many hundreds of variations were produced until the early twentieth century, though the popularity of the tradition waned during the nineteenth century. The most common variation depicts ten steps each representing ten years, with the peak at fifty. Parodic versions have been created for satiric, moralistic, and advertising purposes.

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  "Das Stufenalter des Mannes". Verlag Gustav May Söhne, Frankfurt, c. 1900.
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  James Baillie, 1848. "The Life and age of man, stages of man's life from the cradle to the grave".
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  Unknown Spanish artist, c. 1750
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  Nathaniel Currier, c. 1846. "The Drunkard's Progress: from the first glass to the grave". Lithograph in support of the temperance movement.

Currier and Ives was a New York City-based printmaking business operating from 1835 to 1907. Founded by Nathaniel Currier, the company designed and sold inexpensive hand-painted lithographic works based on news events, views of popular culture and Americana. Advertising itself as "the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints", the corporate name was changed in 1857 to "Currier and Ives" with the addition of James Merritt Ives.

A perennial bestselling series was the Darktown Comics lithographs.

James Merritt Ives (March 5, 1824 – January 3, 1895) was an American lithographer, bookkeeper, and businessman. He oversaw the business and financial side of the firm, Currier and Ives, which he co-managed with his business partner, Nathaniel Currier.

The temperance movement in the United States, which sought to curb the consumption of alcohol, had a large influence on American politics and American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in the prohibition of alcohol, through the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, from 1920 to 1933. Today, there are organizations that continue to promote the cause of temperance.