Books by Eric Burns

For centuries tobacco was generally thought to have medicinal and even spiritual value. Tobacco changed the very course of US history, because its discovery caused the British to support Jamestown, its struggling New World colony. This book chronicles the social history of tobacco, especially in the United States.

How the baby boomers learned about the world in their most formative years

This lively, fascinating account of the surprisingly raucous journalism of the Revolutionary era--and how it helped to build a nation that has endured--offers new perspective on today's media wars

Details the transformation of alcohol from virtue to vice and back again, how it was thought of as both scourge and medicine. This title tells us how the great American thirst developed over the centuries, and how reform movements and laws (some of which, the author says, were "comic masterpieces of the legislator's art") sprang up to combat it.