Martin A. Lee’s latest book, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical Recreational and Scientific reflects his skills as a researcher, especially in the historical sections and his analysis of scientific and medical research. The copy is dense and packed with detail, frequently footnoted for those readers who may be skeptical of his scientific claims. If most Americans would take the time to read this book, it would certainly put the topic of legalizing marijuana in some helpful historical context, and it might help convince those who oppose marijuana legalization that they should reconsider their opposition.

Up with People was a non-profit corporation, a counter to the counterculture, the voice of Nixon’s Silent Majority and it’s well-publicized busload of kids traveling the world and staying with host families delivered an experiment in a new life style, a freshly scrubbed version of hippies. Whether singing “Freedom Isn’t Free” at a barbed wire Berlin Wall checkpoint, showcasing their talents at Richard Nixon’s Inaugural, or performing in later years before groups of auto workers–who unknowingly would soon be laid off by the tour sponsor General Motors–Up with People was on message for the Establishment, spreading the word that being nice was nice, and the nicer you were to people, the more niceness would spread. And the world would live happily ever after.

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

When Philip Dray came by to discuss his book project on the entire sweep of American labor history, I thought he was out of his mind. I knew that he was an accomplished author who had written an award winning-book on lynchings (“At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America”).