BiblioVault - Books about Tobacco

Brazil at the Dawn of the Eighteenth Century

André João Antonil

Tagus Press, 2012

First published in 1711, Brazil at the Dawn of the Eighteenth Century describes the four major economic activities of the Brazilian colony. Half the book is devoted to the sugar industry and the social world of those who grew the sugarcane. Other sections give a detailed view of the tobacco industry. Further, this work describes where and how gold was extracted, the new and old routes connecting Minas Gerais with the coast, and the rough-and-tumble world of the miners. Antonil concludes with discussion of the economic importance of cattle, and information on Brazilian exports and taxes. No other work provides this level of eyewitness detail.

[more]

Breaking the Land

The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880

Pete Daniel

University of Illinois Press, 1985

Winner of the Herbert Feis Award of the American Historical Association, 1985. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association, 1985. Winner of the 1990 Robert Athearn Award of the Western History Association and an Honorable Mention for the 1990 James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize in History and the Social Sciences from the American Conference for Irish Studies.

[more]

The Cigarette

A Political History

Sarah Milov

Harvard University Press, 2019

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

[more]

Consuming Anxieties

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751

Dayne C. Riley

Bucknell University Press, 2024

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. This engaging and original study explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.

[more]

Cuban Counterpoint

Tobacco and Sugar

Fernando Ortiz

Duke University Press, 1995

First published in 1940 and long out of print, Fernando Ortiz’s classic work, Cuban Counterpoint is recognized as one of the most important books of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual history. Ortiz’s examination of the impact of sugar and tobacco on Cuban society is unquestionably the cornerstone of Cuban studies and a key source for work on Caribbean culture generally. Though written over fifty years ago, Ortiz’s study of the formation of a national culture in this region has significant implications for contemporary postcolonial studies.
Ortiz presents his understanding of Cuban history in two complementary sections written in contrasting styles: a playful allegorical tale narrated as a counterpoint between tobacco and sugar and a historical analysis of their development as the central agricultural products of the Cuban economy. Treating tobacco and sugar both as agricultural commodities and as social characters in a historical process, he examines changes in their roles as the result of transculturation. His work shows how transculturation, a critical category Ortiz developed to grasp the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories, can be used to illuminate not only the history of Cuba, but, more generally, that of America as well.
This new edition includes an introductory essay by Fernando Coronil that provides a contrapuntal reading of the relationship between Ortiz’s book and its original introduction by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Arguing for a distinction between theory production and canon formation, Coronil demonstrates the value of Ortiz’s book for anthropology as well as Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, and shows Ortiz to be newly relevant to contemporary debates about modernity, postmodernism, and postcoloniality.

[more]

Honey with Tobacco

Peg Boyers

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Pietà

This time the migraine came with a vision
bathed in night sweat:

I was sitting on the Eames chair,
your man’s body on my lap, legs

and arms white as casein draped over
mine, spilling onto the cassock, new sores

on your legs, dried blood
on your feet and hands,

from your chalk mouth
the words forgive me,

from mine, the impossible
no

Hard Bread,Peg Boyers’s debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers’s own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet’s Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have inspired great works of art—the Annunciation, the Pieta, and Judgment Day—Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be “blessed among women” and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers’ determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Praise for Hard Bread:

“A great achievement of poetic voice . . . . It’s absolutely clear what these poems are ‘about,’ and they are unapologetic in their devotion to subject, clarity, precision, and accessibility.”—Steven Cramer, Poetry

[more]

Puerto Ricans in the Empire

Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism

Teresita A. Levy

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Most studies of Puerto Rico’s relations with the United States have focused on the sugar industry, recounting a tale of victimization and imperial abuse driven by the interests of U.S. sugar companies. But in Puerto Ricans in the Empire, Teresita A. Levy looks at a different agricultural sector, tobacco growing, and tells a story in which Puerto Ricans challenged U.S. officials and fought successfully for legislation that benefited the island.

Levy describes how small-scale, politically involved, independent landowners grew most of the tobacco in Puerto Rico. She shows how, to gain access to political power, tobacco farmers joined local agricultural leagues and the leading farmers’ association, the Asociación de Agricultores Puertorriqueños (AAP). Through their affiliation with the AAP, they successfully lobbied U.S. administrators in San Juan and Washington, participated in government-sponsored agricultural programs, solicited agricultural credit from governmental sources, and sought scientific education in a variety of public programs, all to boost their share of the tobacco-leaf market in the United States. By their own efforts, Levy argues, Puerto Ricans demanded and won inclusion in the empire, in terms that were defined not only by the colonial power, but also by the colonized.

The relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States was undoubtedly colonial in nature, but, as Puerto Ricans in the Empire shows, it was not unilateral. It was a dynamic, elastic, and ever-changing interaction, where Puerto Ricans actively participated in the economic and political processes of a negotiated empire.

[more]

The Smoke of the Gods

A Social History of Tobacco

Eric Burns

Temple University Press, 2006

"Fox News Watch" host Eric Burns, who chronicled the social history of alcohol in The Spirits of America turns to tobacco in The Smoke of the Gods. Ranging from ancient times to the present day, The Smoke of the Gods is a lively history of tobacco, especially in the United States. Although tobacco use is controversial in the U.S. today, Burns reminds us that this was not always the case. For centuries tobacco was generally thought to have medicinal and even spiritual value. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were tobacco users or growers, or both. According to Burns, tobacco changed the very course of U.S. history, because its discovery caused the British to support Jamestown, its struggling New World colony. An entertaining and informative look at a subject that makes daily news headlines, The Smoke of the Gods is a history that is, well, quite addictive.

[more]

Smoking and Pregnancy

The Politics of Fetal Protection

Oaks, Laury

Rutgers University Press, 2001

The 1966 edition of the leading medical textbook states that pregnant women can safely smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet today, women who smoke during pregnancy are among the most vilified figures in public health campaigns. Laury Oaks argues this shift is not due solely to medical findings indicating that cigarette smoking may harm the fetus. Also responsible are a variety of social factors that converged more than a decade ago to construct the demonized category of the “pregnant smoker.”

This book charts the emergence of smoking during pregnancy as a public health concern and social problem. Oaks looks at the emphasis public health educators place on individual responsibility, the current legal and social assertion of fetal personhood, the changing expectations of pregnant and prepregnant women, and the advent of antismoking campaigns. She explores how public health educators discuss “the problem” with one another, how they communicate with pregnant smokers, and how these women themselves understand the “risk” of fetal harm. Finally, Oaks discusses the various meanings of “objective” statistics on the effects of smoking on the fetus, exploring the significance of cultural context in assessing the relative importance of those numbers. She argues that rather than bombarding pregnant women with statistics, health educators should consider the daily lives of these women and their socioeconomic status to understand why some women choose to smoke during pregnancy. Without downplaying the seriousness of the health risks that smoking poses to women and their babies, the book supports new efforts that challenge the moral policing of pregnant smokers.

[more]

Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries

Government Litigation as Public Health Prescription

Donald G. Gifford

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"The topic, how tort law evolved over time into a system that allowed, for a moment at least, a parens patriae form of massive litigation against corporations, is exceedingly interesting and important. Gifford's treatment of this topic is highly informative, engaging, insightful, very current, and wise."
---David Owen, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Law, and Director of Tort Law Studies, University of South Carolina

In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, legal scholar Donald G. Gifford recounts the transformation of tort litigation in response to the challenge posed by victims of 21st-century public health crises who seek compensation from the product manufacturers. Class action litigation promised a strategy for documenting collective harm, but an increasingly conservative judicial and political climate limited this strategy. Then, in 1995, Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore initiated a parens patriae action on behalf of the state against cigarette manufacturers. Forty-five other states soon filed public product liability actions, seeking both compensation for the funds spent on public health crises and the regulation of harmful products.

Gifford finds that courts, through their refusal to expand traditional tort claims, have resisted litigation as a solution to product-caused public health problems. Even if the government were to prevail, the remedy in such litigation is unlikely to be effective. Gifford warns, furthermore, that by shifting the powers to regulate products and to remediate public health problems from the legislature to the state attorney general, parens patriae litigation raises concerns about the appropriate allocation of powers among the branches of government.

Donald G. Gifford is the Edward M. Robertson Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.

[more]

Unfiltered

Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health

Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer

Harvard University Press, 2004

Tobacco, among the most popular consumer products of the twentieth century, is under attack. Once a behavior that knew no social bounds, cigarette smoking has been transformed into an activity that reflects sharp differences in social status.

Unfiltered tells the story of how anti-smoking advocates, public health professionals, bureaucrats, and tobacco corporations have clashed over smoking regulation. The nations discussed in this book--Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States--restrict tobacco advertising, tax tobacco products, and limit where smoking is permitted. Each is also struggling to shape a tobacco policy that ensures corporate accountability, protects individual liberty, and asserts the state's public health power.

Unfiltered offers a comparative perspective on legal, political, and social conflicts over tobacco control. The book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of how scientific evidence, global health advocacy, individual risk assessments, and governmental interests intersect in the crafting of tobacco policy. It features national case studies and cross-cultural essays by experts in health policy, law, political science, history, and sociology. The lessons in Unfiltered are crucial to all who seek to understand and influence tobacco policy and reduce tobacco-related mortality worldwide.

[more]

Very Special Agents

The Inside Story of America's Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency--The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

James Moore, ATF (Ret.)

University of Illinois Press, 1997

When James Moore joined the ATF in 1960, it was an arm of the Internal Revenue Service with one job: to catch the Mafia bootleggers whose distilleries cheated Uncle Sam of millions in tax revenue. During his twenty-five years of service, Moore saw the organization shift to enforcing of gun laws, be reborn as a separate bureau, and take on bombings and arson cases that most law officers wrote off as impossible to solve.

Moore's personal, from-the-hip history spans the long-running war against dons and drug dealers and covers agents' daring infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell's Angels, and other violent groups. He reveals the cutting-edge forensics work that helped crack the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and also provides an insider account of the raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco. Finally, Moore discusses the ATF's rivalry with the FBI and the political power games that impede the government's ability to fight crime.

[more]