Showing posts with label Blacklegs Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blacklegs Reviews. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Review: Journal of Illinois History

Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men has been reviewed in the Journal of Illinois History. Greg Hall writes:
“To bring to life the cultural world of the Mississippi River Valley of the nineteenth century is no easy task […] Thomas Ruys Smith does this with a compilation of stories that focus on specific elements of that cultural world that in some ways are quite alien to our own. Yet the legacy of the period can still resonate within our historical memory […] Therefore it is a significant contribution to our understanding of American cultural history that Smith provides here, because before the cowboy and the gunslinger, there was the riverboat gambler.”
You can read the whole review here.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Advance Praise for Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men

Advance praise for Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories, published May 2010 by Louisiana State University Press:

Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men is the most significant collection of riverlore published in decades. Thomas Ruys Smith’s wide-ranging anthology includes selections from high and low culture, demonstrating the evolution of gambling from a widely feared part of the early river trade to a romanticized American cultural icon. This collection is essential to understanding the history of gambling in America and solidifies Smith’s reputation as the leading cultural historian of American river life.”

“The Mississippi riverboat gambler ranks alongside the mountain man, frontier scout, patriot militiaman, borderlands outlaw, and cowboy as an archetypal American folk hero. Yet the scholarly literature of the riverboat gambler is sparse compared to that of his folkloric colleagues. Thomas Ruys Smith helps to correct this slight in Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men. Smith has gathered together a splendid collection of both literary and historical writings (and combinations thereof) that tell the exciting story of this nineteenth-century icon. Scholars and laymen alike will enjoy sitting back and reading these engaging tales.”
—Michael Allen, author of Rodeo Cowboys In The North American Imagination

Available now from Amazon.