IMAGINE YOURSELF A MAYA. You are short, muscular, and well conditioned; your skin is dark, and your hair is long and unruly. You live in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico more than 1,500 years ago, surrounded by forest and warmed by a sun that is almost always set to low-bake. You raise crops and kill animals, trade pelts and build roads, play a primitive version of basketball, and dance to the rhythms of impromptu percussion. Your house is a hut with mud-covered walls and a roof of palm leaves.

You have filed your teeth until the tips are sharp. You...

HE HAD SUCH HIGH HOPES. Visionaries always do. Christopher Columbus, this “obscure but ambitious mariner,” this dreamer of large dreams who was “considered a little touched in the head,” this man who had vowed to sail to the west to arrive in the east, was about to cast off, to make good on his word or perish in the attempt. He would not prove the Earth was round; most people of the time already knew it, or suspected it, if for no other reason than that they could stand on the shore and, looking out, watch a ship gradually disappear...

THE ROOTS OF EVERY anti-smoking sentiment ever uttered and every anti-smoking document ever published and every anti-smoking movement that ever existed may be found in the reactions of white men to their first sight of tobacco. They may be found in the confusion of de Torres and de Xerez and in the downturned lips of Cartier and in Nicholas Perrot’s amazement as his head was engulfed in fumes and his ears filled with the sounds of supplication. They may be found in laughter and curses, in whispered questions and shouted disdain, and in the sometimes comical attempts of those who...

THE FIRST PERMANENT colony of English citizens in the New World was named for him, but in the beginning this seemed more of an indignity than an honor. James seldom paid attention to Jamestown, and when he did it was usually to complain. He had enough difficulties at home. Why had he sanctioned a whole new set of them so far beyond his reach? Why were those difficulties so resistant to change? Was there anything he could do, other than abandon the whole enterprise, to calm his nerves and restore his pride?

He had told the people who founded the...

AS THE YEARS went by and Virginia turned into a more stable and civilized place, and as new colonies were founded and they, too, smoothed away their rougher, less hospitable edges, tobacco transcended its genre. No longer just a product for which people paid money, it became a form of money itself. The native tribes had long used a variety of items for this purpose: animal skins, shells, fishhooks, pots, salt, tools, and pieces of jewelry among them. To this list the European settlers of North America now added what some were calling the “Golden Token.”

Because the price of...

BENJAMIN RUSH, who appeared in the companion volume to this book,The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol, now pays a visit to the present pages, and for much the same reason. The colonies’ leading foe of demon rum, Rush became, as well, its first serious opponent of tobacco. As a physician, I wrote that Rush was “the leading figure of his era,” known to many as the “‘Hippocrates of Pennsylvania,’ even though some of his ideas, like those of even his most distinguished contemporaries, were so misguided as to be counterproductive. He believed, for example, that certain...

YOU COULD TELL a lot about a man from the way he took his tobacco. You could tell what he thought about himself, what he wanted others to think about him, and how far he was willing to go to be so identified. You could tell about his personality, his standards, his style. And, increasingly, you could tell a lot about a woman.

The pipe had been the first smoke of the American colonists, in large part because it had been the first smoke of Englishmen. Reinforcing their preference were their observations of the native tribes of the New World....

WHEN THE NATIVE tribes of the Americas made their tobacco muskets, they did not use the entire plant. They cut off the stems and damaged leaves and sometimes allowed little corners of leaf to fall to the ground in the process of shredding or packing. They were later discarded, left to rot or be eaten by animals. As the natives did not consume every piece of the plants they ate, neither did they smoke every piece of the plants they inhaled.

But in time, the tribesmen began to see the practice as wasteful, possibly worse. Tobacco was a gift from...

SHE HAS BEEN described as “tall, ungainly, and rather bony, both in face and figure. She had a high forehead, large upper lip, and mouse-colored hair, which gave her a rather masculine appearance.” In fact, she had the appearance of one man in particular: Abraham Lincoln, that longest and leanest and perhaps greatest of presidents of the United States. Most people, noting the resemblance, mocked her. She, however, was proud of it, pointed it out herself, and said it went beyond the merely physical. Like Lincoln, she said, she was not afraid to make the hard decision, to stand alone...

BY 1927, all fourteen states that had either banned or limited cigarette sales between 1895 and 1921 had changed their minds and given the smoke at least partial freedom again. No new laws were added by other states. In fact, when an anti-smoking bill was being considered in Utah, a member of the legislature got so angry about it that he threatened to introduce a proposal of his own to forbid the public sale of corned beef and cabbage. He said the fumes from that stuff were as distasteful to some of his constituents as those of the weed were...

JAMES I WAS RIGHT. Not specific or fair-minded, not politic, and certainly not civil to those who took issue with either his conclusions or his tone. But somehow the man knew what he was talking about in hisCounterblaste to Tobaccowhen he agreed with Philaretes that the weed “makes a kitchen of the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them with an unctuous and oily kind of soot.” Elsewhere in the document he wrote of danger to the lungs, which he did not think could function properly if exposed to hot, foul-smelling smoke.

But there was no way...

IN THE FIRST MONTH of 1964, Americans were watchingDr. KildareandKraft Suspense Theaterand Julia Child,The French Chef, on television. They were going to the movies to see Albert Finney inTom Jonesand Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood inLove With the Proper Stranger. They were listening to “There I’ve Said It Again,” by Bobby Vinton, and “Forget Him,” by Bobby Rydell, on the radio, and at hops and canteens and frat parties and night clubs they were dancing to more upbeat songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” by the Beatles, and the possibly...

IT IS IN MOST WAYS a typical Stephen King short story. Among the characters are a man, whose face “had been covered with lumps that bulged and quivered like tumors possessed of their own terrible semi-sentient life,” and a woman, identically deformed, one of whose lumps “was leaking a thick pinkish substance that looked like bloodstained shaving cream.” They are representatives, these two, of a whole clan of subhumans, creatures whose heads are furry and bat-like, “not round, but as misshapen as a baseball that has taken a whole summer’s worth of bashing.” To make matters even more ghastly, the...