“A little history of Tobacco!
The tobacco plant belongs to the same plant family as the potato and pepper, which also came from the Americas. About 2,000 years ago. Native Americans chewed on tobacco leaves to relieve toothaches and swallowed them as a medicine. They also learned to dry the leaves and smoke them.
Tobacco smoking became an important part of many Native American religions. Priests and other high-ranking men smoked tobacco at special ceremonies to ensure a good harvest, bring rain, or provide victory in battles. Sharing a tobacco pipe with representatives of other nations what we know as “smoking the peace pipe” was a major part of Native American diplomacy.
The start of the tobacco industry.
In the early 1490s, Christopher Columbus was the first man to take tobacco to Europe from North America. Frenchman Jean Nicot (after whom nicotine was named after) introduced tobacco to France in 1556. By 1565, people had begun smoking tobacco in Portugal, Spain, and England.
Englishman John Rolfe began growing tobacco in Virginia in 1612, and the colony soon became a leading producer of tobacco, along with the neighboring Carolinas. The tobacco industry was built on slavery. Huge farms, or plantations, needed large numbers of people to plant and harvest the crop. Between 1619 and 1808 (when the U:S outlawed the transatlantic shipment of slaves), more than 600,000 Africans were sent to North America to work on tobacco plantations. Once in North America, they were bought and sold like tools or cattle.
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The Maya people of Central America were the first to illustrate tobacco smoking. Some pottery created about 1,000 years ago shows a Mayan man smoking tobacco leaves that are tied together with string. The Mayan word for smoking was sik’ar, which is the root of the word “cigar.
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Fact...