Excerpt from Horse-Racing in France: A History Circumstances rather than natural aptitude, taste, inclination, or deliberate design have made me for more than twenty years a close student of horse-racing, both English and French. Into those circumstances there is no occasion to enter, and I have not the slightest intention of being gratuitously tedious. Suffice it to say that my first experience of horse-racing carries me back more than forty years to a day of which I have still a vivid remembrance, when I saw an animal belonging to the famous Colonel (afterwards General) Peel run at a provincial race meeting; and that I believe I can still from mere memory give that animal's name (although it achieved no great celebrity) - 'I-am-not-aware.' Since then I have witnessed a great many of the most memorable races ever run, and have had at least a bowing acquaintance with some of the most notable race horses, English, French, Austro-Hungarian, German, American, and others, that ever came to the post. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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“A History of Horse Racing” contains a collection of classic articles on the subject of horse and horse racing in England and the Unites States. Contents include: “Every Horse Owners Cyclopedia, By J H Walsh”, “The American Trotting Horse”, “The Atlantic Monthly, By John Elderkin”, “A History Of The Turf And The Trotting Horse In America”, “Horse Racing Greats, By Alfred E T Watson”, “Mr. Peter Purcell Gilpin”, “The Badminton Magazine Of Sports And Pastimes - April 1904, By E. Somerville Tattersall”, etc. This book is highly recommended for those with an interest in the history of horse racing. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on horses used for sports and utility.

Horse racing was the first and longest-lasting of Britain's national sports. This book explores the cultural world of racing and its relationship with British society in the long eighteenth century. It examines how and why race meetings changed from a marginal and informal interest for some of the elite to become the most significant leisure event of the summer season. Going beyond sports history, the book firmly places racing in its cultural, social, political and economic context. Racing's development was linked to the growth of commercialized leisure in the eighteenth century, a product of rising wealth amongst the middling group; changes in transport; the expansion of the newspaper press; and the new democratic and individualistic spirit of the age, especially the more flexible social codes of the late Georgian and Regency eras. In this book, horse racing emerges as the first 'proto-modern' sport, with links with the widespread popularity of gaming and betting which forced ever-increasing codification, regulation and event organization. Racing also gave expression to highly nuanced concepts of local, regional, national, class, gender (primarily male) and political identities. Drawing on the fields of social, cultural and sports history and utilizing many hitherto ignored or under-exploited sources, the book revises current histories of eighteenth-century leisure and sport, showing how horse racing links to debates about commercialization, consumer behaviour, the 'urban renaissance' and human-horse relationships. It also sheds new light not only on racehorse ownership, but also on the hitherto hidden world of racing's key professionals: jockeys, trainers, bloodstock breeders, stud grooms and stable hands. MIKE HUGGINS is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria.