Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Was it taking over from other forms of tobacco, maybe? Cigarettes definitely are easy to manufacture and smoke, compared to ones I can think of.
I forget where I read it - or it might have been in a documentary. In the US smoking was mainly a rural or cowboy thing until WWI. It saw another big surge after WWII.
Maybe related, marijuana use was also mostly a rural thing until the “reefer madness” ad campaign misrepresented it as a big-city evil, which backfired and popularized it.
Even though tobacco came from the Americas, cigarettes weren’t all that popular in the US until WWI when they were included in soldiers’ rations.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. Was it taking over from other forms of tobacco, maybe? Cigarettes definitely are easy to manufacture and smoke, compared to ones I can think of.
I forget where I read it - or it might have been in a documentary. In the US smoking was mainly a rural or cowboy thing until WWI. It saw another big surge after WWII.
Maybe related, marijuana use was also mostly a rural thing until the “reefer madness” ad campaign misrepresented it as a big-city evil, which backfired and popularized it.