Entertainment

I’ll drink to that

In his new Discovery series,“How Booze Built America,” Mike Rowe takes a look at events you learned about in middle-school history through beer goggles.

“There’s not one major event in this country that I can think of that wasn’t affected one way or another by liquor,” Rowe tells The Post about the series, which airs on Wednesdays.

In next week’s episode, the Temperance Movement and Prohibition bring the “Dirty Jobs” host-turned-booze historian to New York. He tells the audience over a couple of beers about the story of Carrie Nation.

The setting: Sullivan’s Saloon (1177 Broadway, between 27th and 28th streets). The year: 1901.

“[Nation] is a main reason the Temperance Movement began,” Rowe says. “She is wildly passionate in her opposition to alcohol. She comes in from Kansas, and she becomes famous for these things called ‘hatchetings.’ ”

“She goes from bar to bar in various towns and walked into a bar with a hatchet and a purse full of rocks,” Rowe explains.

“She came to Manhattan and she walked into a bar called Sullivan’s, which happened to be owned by John O. Sullivan, the famous bare-knuckle prize-fighter, and she just went completely bats – – t.”

And Rowe takes it a step further. He manages to tie Nation’s bar bashing to subsequent historical events, like Joseph Kennedy importing liquor illegally during Prohibition, and the path leads him to the conclusion that we may have never landed on the moon without that incident. “So, you know, it’s really fun to talk about the moon landing not in the terms of Apollo 13 or all the stuff we normally hear, but in terms of a 200-pound, hatchet-wielding lunatic, who comes to New York to vandalize a bar,” Rowe says.

For those who have been following the series, the Nation reenactor may look familiar — and suspiciously masculine. Rowe explains that he started out with a female Nation.

“I needed her to go into a bar with a hatchet and tear it to pieces. And it just required extraodinary targeted violence, and she just wasn’t able to do it,” Rowe says.

“So, I took her outfit and I put it on an assistant editor. Jimmy has become our chronic reenactor, he’s in every single scene now, whether it’s Washington or Carrie Nation. And so, Jimmy took the hatchet, and he tore the a – – out of that bar.”