Thoroughbred nation : making America at the racetrack, 1791-1900
Natalie Zacek (Author)
"This book examines the history of horse racing in the United States from the years immediately following the American Revolution, when racing was revived in a style distinct from that of the colonial era, to the end of the nineteenth century, at which time the formation of the American Jockey Club standardized the rules and tone of what had long been a localized sport. It emphasizes the ways in which local and regional elites used this sport and its associated social events as a way to (a) uphold their hegemony within their communities; (b) convince both visitors to their racetracks and a broader reading public that their cities or localities were simultaneously distinctive in their ways and representative of American ideals of gentility, and (c) establish and uphold the regional or national importance of their communities, often in the face of political or economic challenges. The book is structured both chronologically and geographically, as it follows the rise of local racing cultures over the course of the century under study. It begins in Tidewater Virginia, where racing first took root in the American colonies, as the gentry of this region faced the diminution of their long-held economic and political primacy both in Virginia and in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, then moves to Charleston, South Carolina, in which a clique of "Old Charlestonians" used their city's famous Race Week to maintain the social allure of the "Holy City" even as it was replaced as the state's capital by Columbia. Following the movement of white settlement and capital to the south and west, it examines the formation of the "Natchez Nabobs," a small but fabulously wealthy group of cotton planters who were more closely tied to Northern financiers and entrepreneurs than they were to the lesser planters of the Lower Mississippi Valley, and where the culture of tracks such as Pharsalia reflected this combination of national connection and local disconnection. It moves on to New Orleans, whose French inhabitants had little interest in the sport, but where the "Americans" promoted an extravagant style of racing as one element of the city's burgeoning reputation as a lure to Northern and European tourists as a site of all types of worldly pleasures. Moving past the Civil War, which caused the destruction of many Southern tracks and jockey clubs and the fortunes that had sustained them, the next two chapters look at Saratoga Springs and New York City as sites where racing became a sport dominated by Northern interests, the former attempting to establish an elegant social life and a reputation for gentility that mirrored that of antebellum Southern racing culture and the latter more concerned with highlighting the vast wealth and desire to imitate European aristocracy that gave the "Gilded Age" its name and reputation. In the final chapter the focus returns to the South, to Louisville, Kentucky, where civic boosters succeeded in creating a racing festival, the Kentucky Derby, whose appeal made it a major element in attracting visitors to what was promoted as the "Old South," and thus in facilitating what one historian has termed "the romance of reunion" between North and South. By focusing on racing, the manuscript provides a detailed and nuanced account of the development of the most popular sport in the nineteenth-century United States, a subject on which there is as yet no single volume that covers the whole century and examines all of the major sites associated with the sport. But it is a work of social and cultural rather than sport history, as it argues that, although racing's history is a worthwhile subject in itself, it is also a lens through which to examine significant social, economic, and political developments in pre- and post-Civil War America. It "reads" the sport and its participants and spectators from a standpoint of historical anthropology, uncovering what racing meant to them, and why this activity and their engagement with it was important well beyond the world of the racetrack. Drawing upon manuscripts and other sources from more than a dozen archives, it draws upon intensely detailed case studies both to bring to life a largely vanished sporting culture and to show how that culture both reflected and influenced the wider world of a rapidly evolving nation"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2024
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2024