Yet, there is some admirable scholarship, including Anne Funderburg's Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era, which features an entire chapter on the airplane's role in bootlegging. Unfortunately, she is unable to quantify the place of the airplane in the larger context and even she resorts to the anecdotal approach to laundry listing sundry episodes. Similar narrative interludes may be found in Sally Ling's Run the Rum In: South Florida During Prohibition and John Kobler's Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

Documenting the Culture of Aerial Smuggling Fortunately, new digital media archives are now making it possible to not only determine the scale and scope of aerial smuggling by searching across hundreds of newspapers. Where previously, scholars were only able to point to its existence with a handful of accounts, it is now possible also to map the most direct encounters between smugglers and Prohibition enforcement as well as the dynamic evolution of the rhetoric of aerial criminality. Given that most smugglers appeared to have successfully evaded the law, we can view the expansive coverage of aerial smuggling between the world wars as the mere tip of the iceberg of airborne illicit activity. Most useful in this regard are the emergence of the vast text-searchable databases that have developed in the past five years, including Proquest Historical Newspapers, Newspapers.com, and Google News. In the process of research for this paper, I chronicled over 500 distinct events or instances of popular discourse on aerial smuggling reported in the popular press. These reveal four significant insights. The first is the notion expressed by Bilstein, Courtwright, and others that smuggling was simply an outgrowth of barnstormers simply looking for additional work as the novelty and thrill of flight on the part of the general public wore off is only partially true, and significantly minimizes the implications of aerial smuggling.