A celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time,  A Brief History of Vice  explores a side of the past that mainstream history books prefer to hide. History has never been more fun—or more intoxicating. Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization.  Cracked  editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women’s rights to the beer that helped create—and destroy—South America's first empire. And Evans goes deeper than simply writing about ancient debauchery; he recreates some of history's most enjoyable (and most painful) vices and includes guides so you can follow along at home. You’ll learn how to: • Trip like a Greek philosopher. • Rave like your Stone Age ancestors. • Get drunk like a Sumerian. • Smoke a nose pipe like a pre–Columbian Native American. “Mixing science, humor, and grossly irresponsible self-experimentation, Evans paints a vivid picture of how bad habits built the world we know and love.”—David Wong, author of  John Dies at the End “Mixing science, humor, and grossly irresponsible self-experimentation, Evans paints a vivid picture of how bad habits built the world we know and love.”—David Wong, author of John Dies at the End   “Evans's goal is to investigate and illuminate the human tradition of merriment and debauchery, which he does with tact, humor, and insight.”— Publishers Weekly   “An engaging and compelling assemblage of pop culture and cultural anthropology (pop cultural anthropology?), an exploration of the growth of civilization via things that our own culture has in many ways declared taboo. This is one of the more entertaining books, fiction or nonfiction, or whatever, that you'll read this year.”—Allen Adams, The Maine Edge Robert Evans is an editorial manager at Cracked.com. His articles rack up an average of sixty-four million views a year. He was a contributor to the bestselling  You Might Be a Zombie  and  The De-Textbook. CHAPTER 1   Mother Nature:   History's First Bartender   The most important history lesson I ever learned startedwith a big white bucket of rotting fruit in the kitchen of my first apartment.      I was nineteenat the time--too young to buy booze, but too old to spend my weekends sober. Itwas a conundrum. Sure, I knew people who were over twenty-one and willing tobuy me alcohol. But most of them were just as shady as you?d expect based onthe fact that they were willing to buy alcohol for teenagers. Also, I was poorenough that my options for affordable drinking were limited to six-dollarbottles of leaded vodka and, if I was really hard up, Boone's Farm.      But a goodfriend of mine made beer in his kitchen, and he'd walked me through the basicchemistry of the fermentation process. I knew it started with yeast, theone-celled fungi that live in vast colonies, feast on sugar, and poop outalcohol. Brewers simply trapped yeast, a bunch of rotting sugary plant matter,and water in a container and let it all sit for a while until, eventually, beerhappened.      I couldn'tafford to brew beer, though. A five-gallon batch cost upward of forty dollarsin ingredients, a fortune in teenager money. Thankfully, there was a dirtier,easier, route: I could buy a bunch of cheap fruit, mash it up, toss it into abucket with water and yeast, and let that turn into something foul butintoxicating. My friends and I called the resultant brew "hobo jug wine," andhere is the recipe we used:   Ingredients   1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket   1 length of hose, a finger's width or so   1 smaller bucket   Enough pineapples/oranges/apples/whatever fruit to fillup half the bucket Instructions       Peel and chopthe fruit and fill the bucket half full of fruit. Mash it into a pulp, and thenadd water, and cane sugar, if you feel like really taking your sobriety totask. If you're as poor as I was, you can make do with grabbing five gallons' worth of fruit juice concentrate from the grocer's freezer in lieu of honest,God-fearing fruit. Drop a packet of yeast (Fleischmann's bread yeast works justfine) into the mixture, stir, and stick the top of the bucket on.       This nextpart's critical: Booze gives off a lot of CO2 while it's fermenting. You'llwant to make a little hole in the lid of the bucket and run the hose out of itand into the smaller bucket filled with water. That hose will let enough CO2escape that your large bucket won't explode into shards of painful plastic-yshrapnel. (If you don?t run the hose into water, you'll get some fruit bitsspewed everywhere.) Alternatively, you can buy what's known as an airlock fromyour local brew store, as well as a five-gallon plastic brew bucket with a holealready in place. Either way, let the