Tune in a documentary about the Civil War and you expect it to resonate in the present, since the racial issues that emanated from the era of slavery are still very much with us. But a program about Prohibition? Flappers in speakeasies and biddies beating temperance drums: hardly seems a recipe for modern-day relevance.

Yet you can hear history talking directly to the Americans of 2011 all through “Prohibition,” an absorbing five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that runs for three nights, beginning on Sunday on PBS stations. Especially now, the story of America’s disastrous experiment with banning alcoholic beverages seems made for Santayana’s phrase about learning from the past or being condemned to repeat it.

The template that Mr. Burns first used more than 20 years ago in his landmark series on the Civil War gets a boost from the availability of plenty of film to augment the slow pans of still photographs. The generals of wartime are replaced by an impossibly colorful cast of characters: the hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation; Wayne Wheeler, the master manipulator behind the Anti-Saloon League; showboating gangsters like Al Capone.