Sarah Milov is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A former fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, she has written on the tobacco industry, the rise of e-cigarettes, and the grassroots fight to battle climate change. Her research explores how organized interest groups and everyday Americans influence government policy.
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. Milov has an eye for detail.
*Wall Street Journal*
Milov offers insights into the way tobacco companies and their
lobbyists exploited America’s federal system to slow down and
weaken efforts to cut cigarette use despite growing evidence of the
harm it causes…If you are looking for a case study in how
regulation and politics shape the US consumer market, The Cigarette
more than meets the bill.
*Financial Times*
A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government
complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism. The
Cigarette looks beyond individual consumers and their choices and
aims its penetrating gaze straight at the larger phenomena shaping
all of our lives: the exigencies of war, the rise of organized
interest groups, the fall of government regulators, and the
immense, unseen influence of big business.
*New Republic*
If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury
America were really like, this is the book to read…Many readers
will find Milov’s treatment of the anti-smoking movement most
relevant for understanding political struggles today.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
The story of smoking in the United States is usually presented as a
struggle between heroic scientists and activists on the one hand,
fighting to get the truth out to the public, and mendacious tobacco
industry executives on the other, manipulating members of
Congress…Milov provides a more interesting and complicated
account.
*London Review of Books*
Milov manages to bring fresh insight into how the industry’s power
hooked government treasuries, the advertising business and
scientists for hire, to trump public health for so long…What Milov
adds is a nuanced account of the interplay between corporate
machinations and government support for the industry from the 1930s
until very recently.
*Nature*
Cigarettes were widely considered gross and disreputable at the
beginning of the 20th century; by the end, they were on their way
out of widespread public acceptability once more. In between, they
were ubiquitous. The politics of that arc are the subject of [this]
fascinating new work of history.
*Jezebel*
Whether you had thoughts on Stranger Things’ smoking scenes or just
got back from your Juul break, read Milov’s book about the history
of the cigarette…If the movie Yesterday questioned a world without
cigarettes (and The Beatles), this book will make you realize just
how different a world that would have been.
*Refinery29*
Deftly connects the rise in organized opponents to smoking to food
safety, car safety and other consumer rights movements of the 20th
century.
*Smithsonian*
Groundbreaking…Milov intricately unpacks the workings of the
tobacco industry in its interactions with farmers, laborers and
social movements, a hitherto underexplored area in the history of
tobacco in America…Shows us the ubiquity of tobacco in American
society, and its central place in the arc of American political and
social consciousness.
*LSE Review of Books*
Mixes big-picture academic theory with fascinating, specific
details to illuminate the rise and fall of tobacco production…A
fine history.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Milov provides a thoughtful and penetrating analysis of both the
tobacco industry and its relationship to government.
*Library Journal (starred review)*
A revisionist history of tobacco that, at its core, is an
indication of the power of civic activism…A fascinating book on a
quintessential American product…Above all, this is an important
book on the politics and power of citizen activism against industry
doubt-mongering and government regulation that worked against
citizens’ best interests.
*Nursing Clio*
[An] intriguing history of the American cigarette.
*The Lancet*
Breathtaking…Weaves together legal, political, and economic history
in a manner that calls for a revaluation of the dimensions of
twentieth-century liberalism and the nature of its decline. The
book is a compelling exercise in historical synecdoche: its subject
is the political history of the cigarette, but its story is that of
the twentieth-century American state…Milov recounts this
fascinating history with lucid prose and narrative verve.
*Jotwell*
Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette offers critical new insights into the
relationship of American politics to the tobacco industry as it
grew by leaps and bounds through the twentieth century. Deeply
researched and lucidly argued, this book is essential reading as
new electronic cigarettes test historical approaches for regulating
the massive harms of smoking.
*Allan Brandt, author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall,
and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America*
The America of ‘no smoking in public places’ didn’t just happen.
With deep, careful research, Milov reveals its long, fascinating
history as a high-stakes game with contesting actors. And her story
is even bigger than cigarettes; the battle over smoking takes us to
all the hot spots of the nation’s twentieth-century political
economy. The Cigarette is an impressive achievement.
*Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics
of Mass Consumption in Postwar America*
The Cigarette is a subtle, well-researched story whose findings
speak in fresh and often surprising ways to central tensions of
twentieth-century politics. With a fine sense of irony, Milov
reveals how leading advocates of ‘free enterprise’ depended on
tax-funded price supports and quotas that benefited big white
growers. A marvelous contribution to American business and
political history.
*Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History
of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America*
By bringing together the histories of not only tobacco companies,
but also farmers, state officials, smokers, and nonsmokers, Milov
provides a new way to understand American political economy and its
history. A brilliant and original book.
*Jonathan Levy, author of Freaks of Fortune*
The Cigarette is a compelling and eye-opening book. But it is not
what you might expect. Historian Sarah Milov doesn’t retrace the
familiar story of Big Tobacco and its back room dealing and deceit.
Sure, that stuff is here, but this book is bigger and bolder. Based
on exhaustive research, it shows how the cigarette—both as a
product and an idea—was central to the building and tearing down of
American political institutions and legal thinking in the twentieth
century. This book recounts how domestic and foreign policy
representatives encouraged people to smoke at home and abroad, how
tobacco farmers gave shape to fundamental New Deal notions of
statecraft, how nonsmokers emerged as a powerful voice and remade
ideas of citizenship and public space, and really, how you can’t
understand the American past without understanding the role of the
cigarette in it. As Milov guides readers through this exciting and
often unexpected history, she introduces them to an amazing cast of
characters—from denim-clad North Carolina farmers and the bow-tie
wearing C. Everett Koop to Donna Shimp, the crusading New Jersey
office worker who zeroed in on the cost factors of smoking and
brought the very first lawsuit by an employee against an employer’s
smoking policies. This is a history of politics and big ideas and
changes that still has people in it. Pulling all of this together
into one book is a testament to Milov’s storytelling skills and
powerful historical imagination.
*Bryant Simon, author of Everything but the Coffee: Learning
about America from Starbucks*
Adds much to understanding the role cigarettes played in US history
over the last century.
*Choice*
A brilliant and beautiful book about a dark and smoky chapter in
American history…A masterful book penned by a talented historian.
Milov takes a story we think we know and shows how messy the
politics of anti-smoking really was in the United States.
*Journal of Arizona History*
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