On July 11, many thousands of people heard a fascinating story on NPR and WBUR’s Here and Now radio program, in which two esteemed historians asserted that Americans never would have been as dependent as they are on tobacco were it not for the considerable support of the U.S. government. To many, this was surely a surprising assertion, since Big Tobacco is often perceived to be at odds with big government, with its regulations and disclosure requirements and general aversion to its citizens getting sick and dying. There was only one problem: the two historians, both men, did not credit the source of the story—another historian, a woman named Sarah Milov, and her new book, The Cigarette: A Political History.

THE CIGARETTE: A POLITICAL HISTORY by Sarah Milov Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $35.00

Within days, the story was everywhere. It first broke in The Lily, where the article was subtitled, “They have tenure. She does not.” “Every single word they said was from my book,” Milov, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia told The Lily, which noted she was coming up for tenure within the year. Twitter exploded, and countless other publications ran stories. The two historians, Edward Ayers and Nathan Connolly, quickly apologized, as did the radio stations. To many, the incident epitomized a dynamic common in the academy, where male scholars have long taken credit for the work of female associates.

Although, as Jezebel noted, the controversy generated “significant publicity” for Milov’s book, the NPR incident itself threatened to get more attention than the history that Milov spent years unearthing. This would be a shame, for it would miss what The Cigarette really is: a nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism. The Cigarette looks beyond individual consumers and their choices and aims its penetrating gaze straight at the larger phenomena shaping all of our lives: the exigencies of war, the rise of organized interest groups, the fall of government regulators, and the immense, unseen influence of big business.

At the turn of the twentieth century, cigarettes were still a fairly marginal product, derided by moralists as “little white slavers,” mocked by bigots as the habit of immigrants, and eschewed by many in favor of pipes, cigars, or chewing tobacco. It took the federal government to turn the cigarette into an iconic consumer good: In 1917, Congress appropriated money to put cigarettes in the rations of soldiers preparing to fight in World War I, hoping to distract them from “more serious types of vice.” The cigarette caught on, and tobacco companies embarked on innovative advertising campaigns to ensure that the “valorization of the cigarette at war” could continue at peace. And continue it did: from 1914 to 1920, cigarettes jumped from 7 percent to 20 percent of American tobacco consumption. For the next century, federal intervention would continue to determine the cigarette’s trajectory—for good or very, very bad.

With more demand came more problems. The price of tobacco leaf fell. The farmers who planted and cultivated the flue-cured tobacco used to make cigarettes felt “weak and angry.” Their labors had made a handful of powerful white men exceptionally wealthy, but the farmers (to say nothing of the pickers, who labored under barbaric conditions, and the cigarette rollers, who’d been rendered obsolete by machines) felt exploited and undervalued by the reviled “oligopoly” of R.J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, Lorillard, and James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company.