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.

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.

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.

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.

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.