Professional Interests
David Courtwright specializes in drug history. He also writes about violence, political and policy history, aviation, and frontier environments. He has taught medical, U.S., and world history at the University of North Florida, where he is presidential professor emeritus in the Department of History.
His most recent book, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, is a history of global limbic capitalism. He is currently researching and writing a history of the U.S. opioid crisis.
Education
Dr. Courtwright received a B.A. in English from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in History from Rice University.
Books
The Age of Addiction:
How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Listen to an excerpt from the book’s introduction.
Listen to The Age of Addiction on Audible.
VOX interview with Sean Illing
Forces of Habit:
Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
Dark Paradise:
A History of Opiate Addiction in America
Addicts Who Survived:
An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America
Listen to excerpts from interviews with and about Dr. Marie Nyswander.
Addicts Who Survived Oral History Project at Columbia University
No Right Turn:
Conservative Politics in a Liberal America
Violent Land:
Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City
Sky as Frontier:
Adventure, Aviation, and Empire
Listen to Sky as Frontier on Audible.
How Businesses Get People Addicted (David Courtwright Interview)
Ovoid litigation testimony. Judge hearing Washington’s case against 3 opioid distributors gets a medical history lesson.
“Virtue and Vice in an Age of Addiction,” Micah Meadowcroft’s review of The Age of Addiction on the American Conservative website.
Dr. David Courtwright on NPR’s America’s Opioid Epidemic : Throughline
View David Courtwright’s American History TV episodes on C-SPAN.
Philippe Boucher’s web interview about Forces of Habit
“Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction” from Smithsonian Magazine.
Opioid History Sources
Opioid Industry Documents Archive
Lost Women of Science: Marie Nyswander
University of North Florida Teaching and Learning Resources
UNF Oral History Project — Creating a University
