Gambling

November/December 2006

Cardsharping, said the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 1950, “carries a greater stigma than the seduction of a friend’s wife.” Nevertheless, it has enjoyed a long, vigorous life. Here are two tools of the cheater’s trade. Jacob’s Ladder Holdout

What Beats What

November/December 2006

The H. T. Webster cartoon comes from Webster’s Poker Book, published in 1925, when the game was enjoying one of its more vigorous revivals. In his text, which is nearly as amusing as Webster’s cartoons, the writer George F.

Politics And Poker

Steven Lubet | November/December 2006

What one game of cards tells us about two famous statesmen

Poker (or its equivalent) has been popular among the political classes right from the beginning of American history.

A History of Poker

Jack Kelly | November/December 2006

The very American career of the card game you can learn in 10 minutes and work on for the rest of your life

The 18-hole Hustle

Tom LeCompte | August/September 2005

During the golden age of golf, many of the sport’s greatest players never went pro. They couldn’t afford the pay cut.

The Town That Took a Chance

Geoffrey Perret | April/May 2005

From its first boom during America’s biggest gold rush to its current gamble on gambling, Deadwood, South Dakota, has managed to keep itself very much alive.

The Magician and the Cardsharp

Karl Johnson | May 2001

After 20 years of looking for someone who could perform the “middle deal,” Dai Vernon had pretty much decided that this supreme piece of sleight of hand was a fable. Then, one night in a Wichita jail, a prisoner told Vernon he’d seen a man do it…

Nation of Gamblers

J. M. Fenster | September 1994

Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.

“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”

“Born In Iniquity”

John Steele Gordon | February/March 1994

Running the long-lived Louisiana Lottery was as certain a moneymaker as owning the mint.

The Victorians regarded their times, quite correctly, as a great age of reform. They abolished slavery. They spread public education throughout the country. They began the march down the road to women’s rights.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.