Gambling in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

Gambling in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Bob Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This new account of gambling in Britain in the long eighteenth century investigates who gambled, on what, and why.

Gambling in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century

Gambling in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Bob Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This new account of gambling in Britain in the long eighteenth century investigates who gambled, on what, and why.

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel PDF Author: Jessica Richard
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307272
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks.

The Gambling Century

The Gambling Century PDF Author: John Eglin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192888196
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it. Using extensive archival material as well as printed sources, it follows its subjects from the Court to the coffeehouse, to private clubs and "at homes" in townhouses, all of which prefigure that quintessentially modern gambling space, the casino.

Running the Numbers

Running the Numbers PDF Author: Matthew Vaz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669044X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Every day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today’s lotteries can be found in an African American gambling economy that flourished in urban communities in the mid-twentieth century. In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy. As Vaz highlights, early urban gamblers favored low-stakes games built around combinations of winning numbers. When these games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem and Chicago’s south side, police took notice of the illegal business—and took advantage of new opportunities to benefit from graft and other corrupt practices. Eventually, governments found an unusual solution to the problems of illicit gambling and abusive police tactics: coopting the market through legal state-run lotteries, which could offer larger jackpots than any underground game. By tracing this process and the tensions and conflicts that propelled it, Vaz brilliantly calls attention to the fact that, much like education and housing in twentieth-century America, the gambling economy has also been a form of disputed terrain upon which racial power has been expressed, resisted, and reworked.

Card Sharps and Bucket Shops

Card Sharps and Bucket Shops PDF Author: Ann Fabian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113668557X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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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.

Roll the Bones

Roll the Bones PDF Author: David Schwartz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615847788
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Roll the Bones tells the story of gambling: where it came from, how it has changed, and where it is now. This is the new Casino Edition. which updates and expands the global history of gambling to include a greater focus on casinos, from their development in European spas to their growth in Reno and Las Vegas. New material chronicles in greater depth the development of casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and their spread throughout the United States. A new chapter better places Atlantic City's casinos into their correct context, and new material accounts for the rise of casinos in Asia and online gaming. From the first modern casino in Venice (1638), casinos have grown incredibly. During the 18th and 19th century, a series of European spa towns, culminating in Monte Carlo, hosted casinos. In the United States, during those same years, gambling developed both in illegal urban gambling halls and in the wide-open saloons of the western frontier. Those two strands of American gambling came together in Nevada's legal casinos, whose current regime dates from 1931. Developing with a healthy assist from elements affiliated with organized crime, these casinos eventually outgrew their rough-hewn routes, becoming sun-drenched pleasure palaces along the Las Vegas Strip. With Nevada casinos proving successful, other states, beginning with New Jersey in 1976, rolled the dice. From there, casinos have come to America's tribal lands, rivers, and urban centers. In the last decade, gambling has moved online, while Asia--with multi-billion dollar projects in Macau and Singapore--has become a new casino frontier. Reading Roll the Bones, you'll get a better appreciation for how long casinos and gambling have been with us--and what they mean to us today.

When the Chips are Down

When the Chips are Down PDF Author: Rachel A. Volberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
In this book, Rachel Volberg delves into the darker side of the recent growth of lotteries, casinos, and other forms of gambling in this country, arguing that problem gambling should be considered an issue of public health and addressed accordingly.

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men PDF Author: Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807137367
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men, Thomas Ruys Smith collects nineteenth-century stories, sketches, and book excerpts by a gallery of authors to create a comprehensive collection of writings about the riverboat gambler. The voices of canonized writers such as William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, and, inevitably, Mark Twain hold prominent positions. But they mingle seamlessly with lesser-known pieces such as an excerpt from Edward Willett's sensationalistic dime novel Flush Fred's Full Hand, raucous sketches by anonymous Old Southwestern humorists from The Spirit of the Times, and colorful accounts by now nearly forgotten authors like Daniel R. Hundley and George W. Featherstonhaugh. Smith puts the twenty-eight selections in perspective with an Introduction that for the first time thoroughly explores the history and myth surrounding this endlessly fascinating American cultural icon.

Aristocratic Vice

Aristocratic Vice PDF Author: Donna T. Andrew
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300185529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
DIV Aristocratic Vice examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. Each of the four, it was commonly believed, owed its origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish those perpetrators who were members of the elite. In this exciting new book, Andrew explores each vice’s treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class. “Donna Andrew continues to illuminate the mental landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. . . . No historian of the period has made greater or more effective use of the newspaper press as a source for cultural history than she. This book is evidently the product of a great deal of work and is likely to stimulate further work.”—Joanna Innes, University of Oxford /div

Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century

Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: G. Hawisher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230601766
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This volume examines the claim that computer games can provide better literacy and learning environments than schools. Using case-studies in the US at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the words and observations of individual gamers, the book offers historical and cultural analyses of their literacy development, practices and values.