Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Tobacco
The Surgeon General makes his case.
The year 1964 marked the last time that anyone in America relaxed with a cigarette. The date, to be exact, was January 10, 1964. On the next day, Surgeon General Luther L. Terry released his advisory panel’s report on smoking and health.
How a tireless impresario parlayed a cloud of smoke into several fortunes
If you walk through the business districts of American cities these days, in even the worst of weather, you will see underdressed people huddled in doorways. No, they’re not homeless; they’re smokers.
Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the 19th century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looking at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic, and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—What were people really like? How did they greet one another in the street? How did they occupy their leisure time? What did they eat?—Jack Larking brings us a portrait of another America, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.
WE LOOKED DIFFERENT
Within a century after Columbus and his crew first encountered Cuban natives “with a firebrand in the hand and herbs to drink the smoke thereof,” much of Western civilization had taken to tobacco in all its forms—an addiction brought back to the New World in
Five successive Benjamin Harrisons created a private empire of tobacco and trade and a great Virginia plantation
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