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Native American tribes first cultivated tobacco and introduced it to European explorers. The English and Spanish colonists that followed established extensive tobacco plantations throughout what is now the eastern U.S. and the Caribbean. The cigar bands in this exhibit were made barely two decades after the last Native American tribes had been conquered and forced onto reservations by the U.S. Government. Visions of the "untamed West" and "wild Indians" were fresh in the popular mind. Images of Native Americans were common in cigar advertising.
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In the early 1900s, only a small number of Europeans and very few Americans had ever traveled to the Middle Eastern lands, or had more than a vague knowledge of their cultures. Oil had not yet been discovered there, and the Ottoman Empire, though crumbling, still ruled much of the region. England was occupying Egypt, and the nation of Israel would not exist for several decades yet. Persia (Iran) was ruled by a Sultan, and Saudi Arabia would not become a unified kingdom for another generation. Much of North Africa was under European colonial rule.
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