“The Dukes linked sex and the cigarette, which was audacious not only because they were abstemious Methodists but because there’s no earthly reason burning a foul weed in your mouth ought to invoke the pleasures of sex. And yet it does.” The monument to James Buchanan “Buck” Duke stands in front of the English Gothic »

“‘All decked out in tobacco leaves,’ the caption read, ‘she might be aptly termed Miss Venus.'” In August 1937 the tobacco warehouses in Wilson, North Carolina, opened their doors to area tobacco farmers, just as they had each year since 1895. But that summer there was a new attraction in town—the first ever Wilson Tobacco »

“Decades before they used sex to sell cigarettes, they were using sectionalism to sell cigars.” Tobacco doesn’t sell itself. Its purveyors have long been pioneers in advertising and marketing techniques. Leaf through the pages of this special issue and you’ll find plenty of evidence of that: the provocatively posed photographs of women smoking; the celebrity »

She slips it out of its leatherette case,an immaculate cartridgeshe clenches between the red bow of her lipswhile flicking her butane lighter,sucking deeply until the tipstarts to crackle and glow like a fuse. She snaps the lighter shut and blows smokethrough pursed lips over her shoulder,lifting the Lucky between two rednail fingerslike somebody about to »

“It’s not necessarily that we want tobacco; tobacco wants us.” The last tobacco queen is having a rough morning. She’s struggling to complete her thought that “everybody’s gonna die of something, so . . . might as well die of something that’s going to help out the . . . what’s the word?” The filmmaker, »

“My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t proud of her habit–tried to hide it, in fact.” My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t »

“‘It’s Grand Ole Opry Time—Another big Prince Albert show with Ernest Tubb.'” My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t proud of her habit—tried to hide it, in fact—but couldn’t seem, or maybe didn’t really wish, to stop. Although ahead »

University of North Carolina Press, 2009 When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. went to war in 1861, he had almost no idea what he was getting into. He had seen a picture of a Revolutionary soldier, “a white-haired man with his flint-lock slung across his back.” And he had met a few Revolutionary war vets. (They »

Basic Books, 2006 There is certainly no shortage of books on Thomas Jefferson, but Andrew Burstein’s latest effort attempts to view the man from an angle few others have tried. Rereading both familiar and less well-known sources, Burstein argues that our knowledge of Jefferson is incomplete without an extended study of his retirement years. He »

University of Virginia Press, 2007 Helen Rountree knows more than anyone else about the Native Americans of eastern Virginia, and if anyone can write a history of the encounter between them and the English at Jamestown from their point of view, it is she. A recently retired member of the faculty of Old Dominion University »

University of North Carolina Press, 2005 One indication of a book’s value is its ability to invoke powerful images for the reader, images that it directly constructs and those it might encourage by extension. In the early part of I Am a Man!, the powerful image of white male supremacy remained foremost in my mind. »