On today’s episode, Allen is joined in the studio by historian Nan Enstad to discuss her latest book, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. In it, she upends the mythic status of the singular (white, male) entrepreneur and uncovers the shared history of American corporations and the tobacco industry through a global lens, foregrounding the role of Jim Crow laws and the social history of laborers and consumers.

Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an affiliate of the Gender and Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies departments, and the current director of the Food Studies Network. She is the author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1999) and Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (University of Chicago Press, 2018).