Local and Global Cultures of Tobacco Consumption, 1890-1950

FAIN: FA-52048-05

Nan Enstad
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)

This book project is a cultural study of the tobacco industry as one of the first multinational industries that mass marketed goods packaged for personal consumption. I trace the impact of macro-economic developments in the tobacco industry on patterns of daily life in order to illuminate how twentieth-century consumerism took shape within the rapidly changing experiences of ordinary people. Reidsville, North Carolina, a cigarette factory town of approximately 12,000 people, is the local focus of this study. Tobacco connected the town’s citizens to global transformations through the movement of cigarettes and company employees from North Carolina to China.