While Roger Bilstein, David Courtwright and several other scholars have acknowledged aerial smuggling as a component of interwar aviation, such mentions are often of the footnote variety mentioned in passing as mere anecdotal evidence of the wide range of applications with which aviation became associated in the early postwar years. Given the problems of accessing evidence, this cursory assessment of the significance of aerial smuggling as a minor curiosity is understandable and is representative of a much larger scholarly challenge in the field of Prohibition enforcement, which also suffers from the loss and misplacement of the official records of the Bureau of Prohibition in its various forms, along with its allied agencies. Besides

minimizing the significance and legacy of aerial smuggling in defining aviation's role in the creation of an American twentieth century technological identity, these narrative surveys also overlook the role of aerial smuggling in defining the airplane as a socially, politically, and economically disruptive technology even before the First World War. This is particularly important as the international response to these concerns drove an internationalist response to this technology that was fairly exceptional in the realm of emerging technologies. While this legacy has been recognized in the field of aviation law, it has been almost entirely ignored in the field of aerospace and transport history. In aeronautical terms, peace meant the flooding of a nascent civil aviation industry with cheap surplus aircraft and thousands of unfulfilled and rambunctious young veteran aviators who did not have the chance to slake their thirst for adventure in the skies over Western Europe. Though a number of first person accounts and journalists drew attention to the intersection of Prohibition and the emergence of barnstorming culture, it is curiously absent or skirted in the most highly regarded scholarly studies of the period. For instance, Joseph Corn ignores it entirely in his Winged Gospel.