bloodygranuaile | A historical history of gambling

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for President's Day at work about Presidential betting (you can read it here) and I referenced Stephen Longstreet's Win or Lose: A Social History of Gambling in America, which had been quoted in another source. This, however, is not the best research practice ever, and also the tidbit quoted was interesting (it was about T.Jeff), so I checked out Win or Lose from the Boston Public Library.

This book, I found out, was published in 1977, which is almost forty years ago now. So it covers a period of time from the mid-1500s up through "the present," except "the present" is the late '70s, and things in the late '70s were very different from how they are now, and it's kind of hilarious to read, at least if you are as easily entertained by historical change as I am. I think I now need a book more thoroughly covering the time from the 1970s to the present, but Win or Lose does a reasonably thorough job of getting the lay reader up to speed with the first 400 years after Columbus' men rolled up on shore after pitching their cards overboard in a fit of piety.

The book can be a bit disjointed, progressing in more or less chronological order except when it is progressing by subject, where the subject can be either a type of gambling or a specific location or something else. The bulk of each chapter is mostly stories about individual gamblers who were very important or interesting within the given context; they're usually pretty entertaining stories even if they do seem to jump around with little in the way of transitions. But there's also time devoted to explaining how different gambling scenes worked overall, and the rises and falls of various big gambling resorts (there's an especially big section dedicated to Saratoga, New York).

The funniest bit for me was the chapter on how horse racing is far and away the most popular type of gambling in the U.S., because it really, really isn't anymore. When this book was being written, states were just starting to implement lotteries and Atlantic City was just beginning to be revived as a gambling destination. How things have changed!

Anyway, the books is nearly as good a primary historical resource about gambling as it is a secondary one, but I'm OK with that. I'm not sure I'd really recommend it to someone who only wants to read one book about gambling in the U.S. though; there's got to be something more current out there.