Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year “Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.” —New York Times Book Review From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated. After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers’ rights. Activists took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco’s rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science. “A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism.” —New Republic “An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework...A well-told story.” —Wall Street Journal “If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year “Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.” —New York Times Book Review From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated. After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers’ rights. Activists took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco’s rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science. “A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism.” —New Republic “An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework...A well-told story.” —Wall Street Journal “If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History A Smithsonian Book of the Year "Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov's thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse." --New York Times Book Review "An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework...A well-told story." --Wall Street Journal "A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism." --New Republic "If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read." --Los Angeles Review of Books Tobacco is the quintessential American product. From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, it powered the nation's economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco's rise and fall may seem simple enough--a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed--but the truth is more complicated. After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals with her groundbreaking research, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers' rights. Activists and public interest lawyers took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco's rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science.

A truthful and learned treasury of musings on the miracle drug.Beryl...

The invention of mass marketing led to cigarettes being emblazoned in advertising and film, deeply tied to modern notions of glamour and sex appeal. It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness. And no product has received such sustained scientific scrutiny. The development of new medical knowledge demonstrating the dire harms of smoking ultimately shaped the evolution of evidence-based medicine. In response, the tobacco industry engineered a campaign of scientific disinformation seeking to delay, disrupt, and suppress these studies. Using a massive archive of previously secret documents, historian Allan Brandt shows how the industry pioneered these campaigns, particularly using special interest lobbying and largesse to elude regulation. But even as the cultural dominance of the cigarette has waned and consumption has fallen dramatically in the U.S., Big Tobacco remains securely positioned to expand into new global markets. The implications for the future are vast: 100 million people died of smoking-related diseases in the 20th century; in the next 100 years, we expect 1 billion deaths worldwide.

Spanning a century, Pushing Cool reveals how the twin deceptions of health and Black affinity for menthol were crafted—and how the industry’s disturbingly powerful narrative has endured to this day. Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era—because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking—are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel—and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.

The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.

These documents provide a shocking inside account of the activities of one tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, and its multinational parent, British American Tobacco, over more than thirty years.

We live in an age when the cigarette industry is under almost constant attack. Few weeks pass without yet another report on the hazards of smoking, or news of another anti-cigarette lawsuit, or more restrictions on cigarette sales, advertising, or use. It's somewhat surprising, then, that very little attention has been given to the fact that America has traveled down this road before. Until now, that is. As Cassandra Tate reports in this fascinating work of historical scholarship, between 1890 and 1930, fifteen states enacted laws to ban the sale, manufacture, possession, and/or use of cigarettes--and no fewer than twenty-two other states considered such legislation. In presenting the history of America's first conflicts with Big Tobacco, Tate draws on a wide range of newspapers, magazines, trade publications, rare pamphlets, and many other manuscripts culled from archives across the country. Her thorough and meticulously researched volume is also attractively illustrated with numerous photographs, posters, and cartoons from this bygone era. Readers will find in Cigarette Wars an engagingly written and well-told tale of the first anti-cigarette movement, dating from the Victorian Age to the Great Depression, when cigarettes were both legally restricted and socially stigmatized in America. Progressive reformers and religious fundamentalists came together to curb smoking, but their efforts collapsed during World War I, when millions of soldiers took up the habit and cigarettes began to be associated with freedom, modernity, and sophistication. Importantly, Tate also illustrates how supporters of the early anti-cigarette movement articulated virtually every issue that is still being debated about smoking today; theirs was not a failure of determination, she argues in these pages, but of timing. A compelling narrative about several clashing American traditions--old vs. young, rural vs. urban, and the late nineteenth vs. early twentieth centuries--this work will appeal to all who are interested in America's love-hate relationship with what Henry Ford once called "the little white slaver."