Blacklegs Card Sharps And Confidence Men

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Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men

Author : Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807145971
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men by : Thomas Ruys Smith

Download or read book Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1836 Benjamin Drake, a midwestern writer of popular sketches for newspapers of the day, introduced his readers to a new and distinctly American rascal who rode the steamboats up and down the Mississippi and other western waterways -- the riverboat gambler. These men, he recorded, "dress with taste and elegance; carry gold chronometers in their pockets; and swear with the most genteel precision.... Every where throughout the valley, these mistletoe gentry are called by the original, if not altogether classic, cognomen of 'Black-legs.'" 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. Long an iconic figure in American myth and popular culture but, strangely, one that has never until now received a book-length treatment, the Mississippi River gambler was a favorite character throughout the nineteenth century -- one often rich with moral ambiguities that remain unresolved to this day. In the absorbing fictional and nonfictional accounts of high stakes and sudden reversals of fortune found in the pages of Smith's book, the voices of canonized writers such as William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, and, of course, 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 such as Daniel R. Hundley and George W. Featherstonhaugh. Smith puts the twenty-eight selections in perspective with an Introduction that thoroughly explores the history and myth surrounding this endlessly fascinating American cultural icon. While the riverboat gambler may no longer ply his trade along the Mississippi, Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men makes clear the ways in which he still operates quite successfully in the American imagination.

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men

Author : Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807137369
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (373 download)

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Book Synopsis Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men by : Thomas Ruys Smith

Download or read book Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1836 Benjamin Drake, a midwestern writer of popular sketches for newspapers of the day, introduced his readers to a new and distinctly American rascal who rode the steamboats up and down the Mississippi and other western waterways -- the riverboat gambler. These men, he recorded, "dress with taste and elegance; carry gold chronometers in their pockets; and swear with the most genteel precision.... Every where throughout the valley, these mistletoe gentry are called by the original, if not altogether classic, cognomen of 'Black-legs.'" 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. Long an iconic figure in American myth and popular culture but, strangely, one that has never until now received a book-length treatment, the Mississippi River gambler was a favorite character throughout the nineteenth century -- one often rich with moral ambiguities that remain unresolved to this day. In the absorbing fictional and nonfictional accounts of high stakes and sudden reversals of fortune found in the pages of Smith's book, the voices of canonized writers such as William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, and, of course, 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 such as Daniel R. Hundley and George W. Featherstonhaugh. Smith puts the twenty-eight selections in perspective with an Introduction that thoroughly explores the history and myth surrounding this endlessly fascinating American cultural icon. While the riverboat gambler may no longer ply his trade along the Mississippi, Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men makes clear the ways in which he still operates quite successfully in the American imagination.

Working the Mississippi

Author : Bonnie Stepenoff
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826273491
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis Working the Mississippi by : Bonnie Stepenoff

Download or read book Working the Mississippi written by Bonnie Stepenoff and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mississippi River occupies a sacred place in American culture and mythology. Often called The Father of Rivers, it winds through American life in equal measure as a symbol and as a topographic feature. To the people who know it best, the river is life and a livelihood. River boatmen working the wide Mississippi are never far from land. Even in the dark, they can smell plants and animals and hear people on the banks and wharves. Bonnie Stepenoff takes readers on a cruise through history, showing how workers from St. Louis to Memphis changed the river and were in turn changed by it. Each chapter of this fast-moving narrative focuses on representative workers: captains and pilots, gamblers and musicians, cooks and craftsmen. Readers will find workers who are themselves part of the country’s mythology from Mark Twain and anti-slavery crusader William Wells Brown to musicians Fate Marable and Louis Armstrong.

Flush Times and Fever Dreams

Author : Joshua D. Rothman
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820344664
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis Flush Times and Fever Dreams by : Joshua D. Rothman

Download or read book Flush Times and Fever Dreams written by Joshua D. Rothman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

Author : Ross Hair
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317123573
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music by : Ross Hair

Download or read book Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music written by Ross Hair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular vision of the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923–1991). A collection of eighty-four commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify. Where previous collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, had privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records, pointedly blurring established racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. Indeed, more than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator. Over the six decades of its existence, however, it has continued to exert considerable influence on generations of musicians, artists, and writers. It has been credited with inspiring the North American folk revival—"The Anthology was our bible", asserted Dave Van Ronk in 1991, "We all knew every word of every song on it"—and with profoundly influencing Bob Dylan. After its 1997 release on CD by Smithsonian Folkways, it came to be closely associated with the so-called Americana and Alt-Country movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following its sixtieth birthday, and now available as a digital download and rereleased on vinyl, it is once again a prominent icon in numerous musical currents and popular culture more generally. This is the first book devoted to such a vital piece of the large and complex story of American music and its enduring value in American life. Reflecting the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of Smith’s original project, this collection contains a variety of new perspectives on all aspects of the Anthology.

River of Dark Dreams

Author : Walter Johnson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674074904
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis River of Dark Dreams by : Walter Johnson

Download or read book River of Dark Dreams written by Walter Johnson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award “Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.” —Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement “[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.” —The Nation “An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and learned.” —Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream. “Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.” —A. O. Scott, New York Times “River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’” —Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books

Lexington

Author : Kim Wickens
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0593496728
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (934 download)

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Book Synopsis Lexington by : Kim Wickens

Download or read book Lexington written by Kim Wickens and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A vivid portrait of America’s greatest stallion, the larger-than-life men who raced and bred him, and the dramatic times in which they lived.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse The powerful true story of the champion Thoroughbred racehorse who gained international fame in the tumultuous Civil War–era South, and became the most successful sire in American racing history The early days of American horse racing were grueling. Four-mile races, run two or three times in succession, were the norm, rewarding horses who brandished the ideal combination of stamina and speed. The stallion Lexington, named after the city in Kentucky where he was born, possessed these winning qualities, which pioneering Americans prized. Lexington shattered the world speed record for a four-mile race, showing a war-torn nation that the extraordinary was possible even in those perilous times. He would continue his winning career until deteriorating eyesight forced his retirement in 1855. But once his groundbreaking achievements as a racehorse ended, his role as a sire began. Horses from his bloodline won more money than the offspring of any other Thoroughbred—an annual success that led Lexington to be named America’s leading sire an unprecedented sixteen times. Yet with the Civil War raging, Lexington’s years at a Kentucky stud farm were far from idyllic. Confederate soldiers ran amok, looting freely and kidnapping horses from the top stables. They soon focused on the prized Lexington and his valuable progeny. Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports readers back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.

Deep Water

Author : Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807172871
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Deep Water by : Thomas Ruys Smith

Download or read book Deep Water written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain’s visions of the Mississippi River offer some of the most indelible images in American literature: Huck and Jim floating downstream on their raft, Tom Sawyer and friends becoming pirates on Jackson’s Island, the young Sam Clemens himself at the wheel of a steamboat. Through Twain’s iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain’s river occupies in the national imaginary, until now no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume. Thomas Ruys Smith’s Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain is the first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Twain’s intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity. It follows Twain’s remarkable connection to the Mississippi, from his early years on the river as a steamboat pilot, through his most significant literary statements, to his final reflections on the crooked stream that wound its way through his life and imagination. Alongside Twain’s evolving relationship to the river, Deep Water details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period—from roustabouts to canoeists, from books for boys to blues songs—and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river. Smith weaves together these perspectives, putting Twain and his creations in conversation with a dynamic cast of river characters who helped transform the Mississippi into a vibrant American icon. By balancing evocative cultural history with thought-provoking discussions of some of Twain’s most important and beloved works, Deep Water gives readers a new sense of both the Mississippi and the remarkable writer who made the river his own.

Shantyboats and Roustabouts

Author : Gregg Andrews
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807179078
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Shantyboats and Roustabouts by : Gregg Andrews

Download or read book Shantyboats and Roustabouts written by Gregg Andrews and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Author : Reid Neilson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190867841
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis A Voice in the Wilderness by : Reid Neilson

Download or read book A Voice in the Wilderness written by Reid Neilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1888, Andrew Jenson, Danish immigrant and convert to the Mormon faith, received an unexpected invitation from church leaders to speak at their general conference. Jenson was an outsider to this conference tradition, a layman whose only standing before the main body of Latter-day Saints came from a contracted position with the Church Historian's Office. Forty-two years later, in April 1930, Jenson offered his twenty-eighth and final general conference sermon. He had become the voice of institutional record keeping in his over forty-year career as an Assistant Church Historian. His sermons demonstrated the growth and expansion of the Mormon general conference tradition in the twentieth century, as they placed the Latter-day Saint story front and center for church members to learn from and celebrate. In addition, Jenson urged conference goers to keep better personal and institutional records and believed he was often the solitary advocate for church record keeping and historical preservation. A Voice in the Wilderness presents all twenty-eight of Andrew Jenson's general conference sermons, with introductions and annotations that set them within their historical and religious contexts. His speeches capture a unique period in Mormon history, one of institutional change, accommodation, and growth. This study of Jenson's sermons uncovers the richness and diversity that thrives just beneath the surface of official ecclesiastical discourse.

Gods of the Mississippi

Author : Michael Pasquier
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253008034
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Gods of the Mississippi by : Michael Pasquier

Download or read book Gods of the Mississippi written by Michael Pasquier and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the colonial period to the present, the Mississippi River has impacted religious communities from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Exploring the religious landscape along the 2,530 miles of the largest river system in North America, the essays in Gods of the Mississippi make a compelling case for American religion in motion—not just from east to west, but also from north to south. With discussion of topics such as the religions of the Black Atlantic, religion and empire, antebellum religious movements, the Mormons at Nauvoo, black religion in the delta, Catholicism in the Deep South, and Johnny Cash and religion, this volume contributes to a richer understanding of this diverse, dynamic, and fluid religious world.

Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers

Author : Sarah Churchwell
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441195130
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers by : Sarah Churchwell

Download or read book Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers written by Sarah Churchwell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about certain books that makes them bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined? Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, Must Read is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers as well as critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation's founding. Focusing on a mix of enduring and forgotten bestsellers, the essays in this collection consider 18th and 19th century works, like Charlotte Temple or Ben-Hur, that were once considered epochal but are now virtually ignored; 20th century favorites such as The Sheik and Peyton Place; and 21st century blockbusters including the novels of Nicholas Sparks, The Kite Runner, and The Da Vinci Code.

Southern Queen

Author : Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1847251935
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (472 download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Queen by : Thomas Ruys Smith

Download or read book Southern Queen written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and entertaining look at this crucible period in the life of one of America's most distinctive cities.

Journal of Illinois History

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (243 download)

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Book Synopsis Journal of Illinois History by :

Download or read book Journal of Illinois History written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

River of Dreams

Author : Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807143081
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis River of Dreams by : Thomas Ruys Smith

Download or read book River of Dreams written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.

Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi

Author : George H. Devol
Publisher : Applewood Books
ISBN 13 : 1557091102
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (57 download)

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Book Synopsis Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi by : George H. Devol

Download or read book Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi written by George H. Devol and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George H. Devol was the greatest riverboat gambler in the history of the Mississippi. Born in Ohio in 1829, he ran away from home and worked as a cabin boy at age ten. At fourteen he could stack a deck of cards. Over the years, he bilked soldiers, paymasters, cotton buyers, thieves, and businessmen alike. He fought more fights than anyone, and was never beaten. This is his story. Nobody was ever bored by it.

Something for Nothing

Author : Jackson Lears
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101200375
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis Something for Nothing by : Jackson Lears

Download or read book Something for Nothing written by Jackson Lears and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-07-27 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.