The Notorious John Morrissey
The Notorious John Morrissey

Author: James C. Nicholson

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0813167523

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An Irish immigrant, a collection agent for crime bosses, a professional boxer, and a prolific gambler, John Morrissey was—if nothing else—an unlikely candidate to become one of the most important figures in the history of Thoroughbred racing. As a young man, he worked as a political heavy in New York before going to San Francisco in search of fortune at the height of the Gold Rush. After returning to the east coast, he was hired by Tammany Hall and was soon locked in a deadly rivalry with William Poole, better known as "Bill the Butcher." As time went on, Morrissey parlayed his youthful exploits into a remarkably successful career as a businessman and politician. After establishing a gambling house in Saratoga Springs, the hardnosed entrepreneur organized the first Thoroughbred race meet at what would become Saratoga Race Course in 1863. Morrissey went on to be elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and two terms in the New York State Senate. In this book, James C. Nicholson explores the improbable life of the man who brought Thoroughbred racing back to prominence in the United States. Though few of his contemporaries did more to develop the commercialization of sports in America, Morrissey's colorful background has prevented him from getting the attention he deserves. This entertaining and long-overdue biography finally does justice to his astounding rags-to-riches story while exploring an intriguing chapter in the history of horse racing.

Bare Knuckles & Saratoga Racing
Bare Knuckles & Saratoga Racing

Author: Brien Bouyea

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2016-04-04

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 143965624X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Chronicling the incomparable life of boxing and Saratoga Race Course legend John Morrissey. John "Old Smoke" Morrissey was one of the most dynamic characters of his time. He went from a career as an undefeated bare-knuckle boxer, founded the Saratoga Race Course and eventually won elections to Congress and the New York State Senate. A poor, uneducated Irish immigrant, Morrissey became a leader in the Dead Rabbits street gang. He won fame as a fighter and fortune as the operator of a string of successful gambling houses. Morrissey then took Saratoga Springs by storm, improbably resurrecting thoroughbred racing during the Civil War and opening his famous Club House, which was the most glamorous casino the country had ever seen. Author and National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame director of communications Brien Bouyea takes you on this fascinating journey and shows just how Morrissey did it all.

All the Nations Under Heaven
All the Nations Under Heaven

Author: Robert W. Snyder

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0231548583

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 1996, All the Nations Under Heaven has earned praise and a wide readership for its unparalleled chronicle of the role of immigrants and migrants in shaping the history and culture of New York City. This updated edition of a classic text brings the story of the immigrant experience in New York City up to the present with vital new material on the city’s revival as a global metropolis with deeply rooted racial and economic inequalities. All the Nations Under Heaven explores New York City’s history through the stories of people who moved there from countless places of origin and indelibly marked its hybrid popular culture, its contentious ethnic politics, and its relentlessly dynamic economy. From Dutch settlement to the extraordinary diversity of today’s immigrants, the book chronicles successive waves of Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants and African American and Puerto Rican migrants, showing how immigration changes immigrants and immigrants change the city. In a compelling narrative synthesis, All the Nations Under Heaven considers the ongoing tensions between inclusion and exclusion, the pursuit of justice and the reality of inequality, and the evolving significance of race and ethnicity. In an era when immigration, inequality, and globalization are bitterly debated, this revised edition is a timely portrait of New York City through the lenses of migration and immigration.

Ambitions
Ambitions

Author: Frank Baillargeon

Publisher: Frank Baillargeon

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does an impoverished and illiterate Irish Catholic immigrant rise from abject poverty and discrimination in mid-19th Century America to become America’s boxing champion, a millionaire gambling entrepreneur, a twice-elected member of the United States Congress, and a twice-elected member of the New York State Senate? The accomplishments of John Morrissey (1831-1878) are well-documented. What’s missing is how? Certainly, luck, timing, resolve, and intelligence played key roles, but there was something else, something more powerful and motivating, that helped lift him, against all odds, to the pinnacle of success in sports, business, and politics during a time when hatred of Irish Catholics permeated American society. That something was the unlikely marriage to a young woman from a respected Protestant family, a recent graduate of Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, and a person with driving ambitions as powerful as her husband’s. In Ambitions, a three-book series of novels, the author teases Susannah Morrissey out of the shadows of John Morrissey’s life and places her and her ambitions in the critical roles played in this extraordinary story of love and struggle, perseverance, and triumph.

Smashing the Liquor Machine
Smashing the Liquor Machine

Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0190841575

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.

Thoroughbred Nation
Thoroughbred Nation

Author: Natalie A. Zacek

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2024-09-09

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0807183229

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the colonial era to the beginning of the twentieth century, horse racing was by far the most popular sport in America. Great numbers of Americans and overseas visitors flocked to the nation’s tracks, and others avidly followed the sport in both general-interest newspapers and specialized periodicals. Thoroughbred Nation offers a detailed yet panoramic view of thoroughbred racing in the United States, following the sport from its origins in colonial Virginia and South Carolina to its boom in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and then from its post–Civil War rebirth in New York City and Saratoga Springs to its opulent mythologization of the “Old South” at Louisville’s Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Natalie A. Zacek introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters, from “plungers” such as Virginia plantation owner William Ransom Johnson (known as the “Napoleon of the Turf”) and Wall Street financier James R. Keene (who would wager a fortune on the outcome of a single competition) to the jockeys, trainers, and grooms, most of whom were African American. While their names are no longer known, their work was essential to the sport. Zacek also details the careers of remarkable, though scarcely remembered, horses, whose achievements made them as famous in their day as more recent equine celebrities such as Seabiscuit or Secretariat. Based upon exhaustive research in print and visual sources from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, Thoroughbred Nation will be of interest both to those who love the sport of horse racing for its own sake and to those who are fascinated by how this pastime reflects and influences American identities.

Summary of T. J. English's Paddy Whacked
Summary of T. J. English's Paddy Whacked

Author: Milkyway Media

Publisher: Milkyway Media

Published: 2024-03-27

Total Pages: 23

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Get the Summary of T. J. English's Paddy Whacked in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "Paddy Whacked" by T. J. English chronicles the rise and fall of the Irish American underworld, tracing its origins to the arrival of John Morrissey in New York City in 1849. Morrissey's journey from political enforcer to the first Irish Mob boss in America sets the stage for a saga of ambition, violence, and criminal enterprise. The book explores the notorious Five Points slum, the gang wars of the 1850s, and the evolution of the term "mob boss" from political mob primaries...

Electoral Capitalism
Electoral Capitalism

Author: Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-08-14

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0812297237

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Vast fortunes grew out of the party system during the Gilded Age. In New York, party leaders experimented with novel ways to accumulate capital for political competition and personal business. Partisans established banks. They drove a speculative frenzy in finance, real estate, and railroads. And they built empires that stretched from mining to steamboats, and from liquor distilleries to newspapers. Control over political property—party organizations, public charters, taxpayer subsidies, and political offices—served to form governing coalitions, and to mobilize voting blocs. In Electoral Capitalism, Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer reappraises the controversy over wealth inequality, and why this period was so combustible. As ranks of the dispossessed swelled, an outpouring of claims transformed the old spoils system into relief for the politically connected poor. A vibrant but scorned culture of petty officeholding thus emerged. By the turn of the century, an upsurge of grassroots protest sought to dislodge political bosses from their apex by severing the link between party and capital. Examining New York, and its outsized role in national affairs, Broxmeyer demonstrates that electoral capitalism was a category of entrepreneurship in which the capture of public office and the accumulation of wealth were mutually reinforcing. The book uncovers hidden economic ties that wove together presidents, senators, and mayors with business allies, spoilsmen, and voters. Today, great political fortunes have dramatically returned. As current public debates invite parallels with the Gilded Age, Broxmeyer offers historical and theoretical tools to make sense of how politics begets wealth.