The rise and fall of America's deadly love affair with the cigarette
Mechanized production and media glamorized smoking before addiction evidence and a 1964 surgeon general report drove warnings and restrictions.
- Early versions of cigarettes trace back to the Mayans, but hand-rolling remained labor-intensive until the 1880s, when Virginia inventor John Bansack created an automated cigarette-rolling machine making smokes 50 times faster.
- Tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke invested in Bansack's technology and developed more palatable tobacco blends, building the cigarette business into a major American industry during the industrial boom.
- American culture embraced cigarettes in the 20th century as a symbol of stylish adulthood, omnipresent in bars, restaurants, and hospitals. By the 1950s, nearly half of U.S. adults smoked, says tobacco history scholar K. Michael Cummings.
- A watershed moment arrived in 1964 with an authoritative U.S. surgeon general report linking smoking to illness and death. The findings drove warning labels on cigarette packs, bans on commercials, and restrictions on where people could light up.
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. famously described smoking as a "fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide," capturing the paradox of cigarettes in American culture. This fixture of U.S. history marks the 250th anniversary through the "American Objects" series.
15 Articles
15 Articles
The rise and fall of America's deadly love affair with the cigare
NEW YORK (AP) — Cancer stick. Coffin nail. Cowboy killer. Those are nicknames, through the decades, for the cigarette — the once-glamorous desideratum of American society that has been tied to tens of millions of U.S. deaths.
The Toronto Star
The rise and fall of America’s deadly love affair with the cigarette
NEW YORK (AP) — Cancer stick. Coffin nail. Cowboy killer. Those are nicknames, through the decades, for the cigarette — the once-glamorous desideratum of American society that has been tied
Daily Journal
The rise and fall of America's deadly love affair with the cigarette
Cancer stick. Coffin nail. Cowboy killer. Those are nicknames, through the decades, for the cigarette. The once-glamorous style of American adulthood has been tied to tens of millions of U.S. deaths. The cigarette was not invented in the U.S. And…
America’s Deadly Love Affair With Cigarettes: The Rise and Fall of Smoking Culture
NewsFinale NewsFinale Journal NEW YORK – “Cancer stick.” “Coffin nail.” “Cowboy killer.” Over the decades, those grim nicknames have been attached to the cigarette — once a glamorous fixture of American life, now known to have contributed to the deaths of tens of millions of people in the United States. The cigarette did not originate in the United […]
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