Gambling on the Western Rivers PDF Download

Author: Herbert Asbury
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gambling
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Author: Herbert Asbury
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780656816118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Excerpt from Gambling on the Western Rivers The Boards and the Staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County present this account in the hope that it will prove interesting and informative to Library patrons. 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.

Author: Louis C. Hunter
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486157784
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Richly detailed definitive account covers every aspect of steamboat's development — from construction, equipment, and operation to races, collisions, rise of competition, and ultimate decline of steamboat transportation.

Author: Herbert Asbury
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 178720135X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
From the great raconteur of the American underworld, and author of The Gangs of New York, comes Sucker’s Progress: An Information History of Gambling in America. From Midwestern Riverboats to East Coast Racetracks, Herbert Asbury explores the legal and illegal history of gambling in pre-WWII America. Describing notorious gambling havens like Chicago and New Orleans, as well as lesser-known outposts in cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio, Asbury examines the gambling houses, big and small, which peppered the American landscape. Also presented are the lives of some of America’s most famous gamblers, including Mike McDonald, John Morrissey, and Richard Canfield, as well as their infamous counterparts like “Canada Bill” and “Charley Black Eyes,” men who made their names as grifters and con men. Asbury also explores the games these men played, describing the rules and origins of dozens of dice and card games. From $1 lottery tickets to thousand dollar pokes antes, America’s love of gambling thrives today, but it was during Asbury’s era that gambling was established as an American passion. “Asbury embarked on what seems in retrospect an extraordinary mission: to document the entire underworld of America, from New Orleans to San Francisco....His studies of gambling, of the racial politics of the New Orleans French Quarter, and of the history of Chicago crime remain monuments to an ambition that was then confined to the fringes of pop history. Sucker’s Progress, his history of gambling and swindling in America, is dense with facts about a subject one would have thought persisted only as rumour and tall tale.”—A. GOPNIK, The New Yorker One of the best American books of its kind. He tells the story of the New York underworld of the past century, and his narrative is excellently presented in a book adorned with amusing pictures from the weeklies and newspapers.”—E. Pearson, The Sat. Rev. of Books

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.

Author: Jonathan Harrington Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gambling
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries. Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Navigation
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Author: Michael R. Allen
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807119075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Western Rivermen, the first documented sociocultural history of its subject, is a fascinating book. Michael Allen explores the rigorous lives of professional boatmen who plied non-steam vessels—flatboats, keelboats, and rafts—on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers from 1763-1861. Allen first considers the mythical “half horse, half alligator” boatmen who were an integral part of the folklore of the time. Americans of the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War period perceived the rivermen as hard-drinking, straight-shooting adventurers on the frontier. Their notions were reinforced by romanticized portrayals of the boatmen in songs, paintings, newspaper humor, and literature. Allen contends that these mythical depictions of the boatmen were a reflection of the yearnings of an industrializing people for what they thought to be a simpler time. Allen demonstrates, however, that the actual lives of the rivermen little resembled their portrayals in popular culture. Drawing on more than eighty firsthand accounts—ranging from a short letter to a four-volume memoir—he provides a rounded view of the boatmen that reveals the lonely, dangerous nature of their profession. He also discusses the social and economic aspects of their lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Allen’s comprehensive, highly informative study sheds new light on a group of men who played an important role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West and the ways in which their lives were transformed into one of the enduring themes of American folk culture.

Author: John Habermehl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mississippi River Valley
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Author: Albert Borowitz
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873386937
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The interplay between crime fact and crime fiction can be detected back to literature's earliest beginnings. True crime has long been the basis of many plots of memorable literature - from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Jean Genet's play The Maids, there has often been blood on the page.