Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society
Exhibitions
2020
“Sports + Cigarettes = A Losing Team“
From the diamond to the gridiron, and from the race track to the tennis court, tobacco companies have long teamed up to sponsor sports around the world. The exhibitions featured above are drawn from the Sports Sponsorship by Tobacco Companies collection at the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society…
2020
This exhibition is drawn entirely from the Center’s Children and Tobacco Collection, which consists of candy cigarette, cigar, and chewing tobacco products sold in sweets shops the world over throughout the 20th century…
2019
“Museum Malignancy: Tobacco Industry Sponsorship of the Arts”
Corporate sponsorship of dance troupes, opera companies, concert tours, film festivals, and art exhibitions at leading museums and libraries was pioneered in the 1950s by Philip Morris, the manufacturer of the fastest growing cigarette in America, Marlboro, as a means of diverting attention from…
2019
“The Unfiltered Truth About Smoking: The American Medical Association Rewrites Tobacco History”
This exhibition explores the corrupting influence of the tobacco industry in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as the decades-long complicity of the AMA with the tobacco industry to ignore or deflect concerns over the adverse health consequences of cigarette smoking.
2018
From 1914 to 1918, the great empires of Europe clashed in a global conflict that involved more than 70 million soldiers and cost over 16 million lives. Tobacco also went to war, packed in every doughboy’s knapsack. Through patriotic advertising and stepped-up production, cigarettes would supplant cigars…
2018
“Of Mice & Menthol: African Americans & Smoking”
Quick, what color is menthol?
No, it’s not green. Menthol is a colorless anesthetic, like Lidocaine that the dentist uses to mask pain. Accidentally discovered by a young man, Lloyd “Spud” Hughes, in the 1920s to reduce the harshness of smoking after he’d stored his cigarettes…
2018
In the first two decades of the 20th century, cigarette smoking became one of the great unifying elements of society. Movies were becoming the top entertainment medium, and on the screen people from every walk of life were enjoying cigarettes.
Tobacco companies soon enlisted the top movie stars…
2018
“Big Tobacco in the Big Apple”
It is little appreciated that for most of the past half-century, New York City was the global headquarters of the tobacco industry and its allies: three of the six major cigarette companies; nearly all of their advertising agencies and public relations firms; the three major commercial television networks and the two most…
2018
“Stamping Out Smoking: Anti-Smoking Postage Stamps from Around the World”
This exhibition features more than 100 anti-smoking postage stamps and philatelic covers (envelopes with stamps) issued by 65 countries. These stamps represent less than half of Dr. James Lutschg’s collection of the world’s tobacco related stamps and philatelic covers, which he donated to…
