Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops

Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops PDF Author: Ann Fabian
Publisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description

Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops

Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops PDF Author: Ann Fabian
Publisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Card Sharps and Bucket Shops

Card Sharps and Bucket Shops PDF Author: Ann Fabian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136685642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In a highly readable work that engages topics in American cultural, social and business history, Ann Fabian details the place of gambling in industrializing America. Card Sharps and Bucket Shops investigates the relationship between gambling and other ways of making profit, such as speculation and land investment, which became entrenched during the nineteenth century. While all these undertakings ran counter to deeply ingrained American--and Protestant--work ethics, only gambling took on a stigma that made other efforts to acquire wealth socially acceptable. Fabian considers here the reformers who sought to ban gambling; psychological explanations for the deviant gambler; numbers games in the African American community; and efforts by speculators to draw distinctions between their own activities and gambling. She combines first-rate cultural analysis with rigorous research, and along the way provides a wealth of colorful details, characters and anecdotes.

Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops

Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops PDF Author: Ann Fabian
Publisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Flush Times and Fever Dreams

Flush Times and Fever Dreams PDF Author: Joshua D. Rothman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the “Arkansas morass” in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart’s adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart’s story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America’s Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

The Kid of Coney Island

The Kid of Coney Island PDF Author: Woody Register
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195167320
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
A portrait of the pioneering entrepreneur who designed and built Luna Park - which in 1903 transformed Coney Island into a respectable venue for middle-class recreation - and created the Hippodrome, the world's largest theater when it opened in 1905, filling it with lavish spectacles at affordable ticket prices. The author also explores the development of the idea of adult amusements in America during Thompson's day, and ours.

Looking Forward

Looking Forward PDF Author: Jamie L. Pietruska
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647500X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Introduction: crisis of certainty -- Cotton guesses -- The daily "probabilities"--Weather prophecies -- Economies of the future -- Promises of love and money -- Epilogue: specters of uncertainty

Dice, Cards, Wheels

Dice, Cards, Wheels PDF Author: Thomas M. Kavanagh
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions. Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler. Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.

Something for Nothing

Something for Nothing PDF Author: Jackson Lears
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200375
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Jackson Lears has won accolades for his skill in identifying the rich and unexpected layers of meaning beneath the familiar and mundane in our lives. Now, he challenges the conventional wisdom that the Protestant ethic of perseverance, industry, and disciplined achievement is what made America great. Turning to the deep, seldom acknowledged reverence for luck that runs through our entire history from colonial times to the early twenty-first century, Lears traces how luck, chance, and gambling have shaped and, at times, defined our national character.

In Hock

In Hock PDF Author: Wendy A. Woloson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226905691
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The definitive history of pawnbroking in the United States from the nation’s founding through the Great Depression, In Hock demonstrates that the pawnshop was essential to the rise of capitalism. The class of working poor created by this economic tide could make ends meet only, Wendy Woloson argues, by regularly pawning household objects to supplement inadequate wages. Nonetheless, businessmen, reformers, and cultural critics claimed that pawnshops promoted vice, and employed anti-Semitic stereotypes to cast their proprietors as greedy and cold-hearted. Using personal correspondence, business records, and other rich archival sources to uncover the truth behind the rhetoric, Woloson brings to life a diverse cast of characters and shows that pawnbrokers were in fact shrewd businessmen, often from humble origins, who possessed sophisticated knowledge of a wide range of goods in various resale markets. A much-needed new look at a misunderstood institution, In Hock is both a first-rate academic study of a largely ignored facet of the capitalist economy and a resonant portrait of the economic struggles of generations of Americans.

Lincoln Dreamt He Died

Lincoln Dreamt He Died PDF Author: Andrew Burstein
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137278277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In this innovative new book, highly regarded historian Burstein goes back forthe first time to discover what people can learn about the lives and emotionsof Americans, from colonial times to the beginning of the modern age.