Cigarettes

J.M. Fenster | October 2006

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.

Cancer Aside, Smoking Remains So Cool in Movies

Fred Andersen | July/August 1998

Why, with cigarette smoking under attack everywhere, does everyone still light up on the movie screen?

There was a “Nightline” a while back during which Jeff Greenfield delivered a puzzled examination of smoking in the movies.

Agents of Change

Phil Patton | December 1994

You’ve probably never heard of them, but these ten people changed your life. Each of them is a big reason why your world today is so different from anyone’s world in 1954.

For want of nails, kingdoms are won and lost. We all know that. The shoe slips, the horse stumbles, the army dissolves in retreat. But who designed the nails? Who hammered the nails? Who invented the nail-making machinery?

“I’ll Trade You Two John Arkinses for an O. H. Rothaker”

Michael M. Lewis | October 1994

The mysterious apotheosis of the newspaper editor

It’s a bad sign when a company decides that, to sell its products, it needs to bundle them together with miscellaneous, unrelated goods.

Cigarette Century

John A. Meyer | December 1992

In the past 70 years, while several major diseases have been eradicated, one has risen from obscurity to take its place among the nation’s leading killers.

The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis in 1919 might have wondered during his last days why all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr.

Match Safes

August/September 1982

Once you’ve discovered fire, you have to keep it from burning you. This is how it was managed before the safety match.

Thank You For Not Smoking

Gordon L. Dillow | February/March 1981

THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR AGAINST THE CIGARETTE

It was like any other Tuesday lunch hour, until the sheriff’s deputies walked in. Mr. Ernest Bamberger, general manager of the Keystone Mining Company and recent (unsuccessful) Republican candidate for United States senator, and Mr. John C.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.