The Science and Economics of Poker

2013 ◽  
pp. 386-401
Author(s):  
Robert C. Hannum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Card Game ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Card Games ◽  
Gambling Activities

Although poker has roots in card games played in Europe and the Middle East as far back as the fifteenth century, the modern game of poker originated in the early nineteenth century in the gambling saloons of New Orleans. It has long been the most popular card game among Americans. It has recently reached unprecedented popularity due to a variety of factors, including television and Internet exposure. Poker is somewhat unique among gambling activities due to the fact that it is not house banked and because of the considerable elements of skill required, which are not present in other casino-style and lottery-type games. This chapter explores the science and economics of poker.

The Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin: A Critique

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
H.O. Danmole
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ibadan ◽  
Local Languages

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.

Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge, Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family

1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
N. W. Alcock ◽  
C. T. Paul Woodfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Social Importance

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

An Introduction to the Life of Conrad Martens

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Older Brothers ◽  
The Family ◽  
The City

The story of Conrad Martens begins in London in the early nineteenth century, when on 21 March 1801, a third son and fourth and youngest child was born to a merchant of German origins, J. Christopher Heinrich Martens, and his English wife, Rebecca née Turner. The family lived above their premises in the crowded old trading quarter of the city in a street called Crutched Friars, near the present day site of Fenchurch Street Station. ‘Having no taste for mercantile pursuits’, as Conrad Martens put it many years later, all three Martens boys became artists, despite the family's European traditions as merchants going back to the fifteenth century. Influenced by his older brothers, Conrad, at the age of sixteen, became a pupil of the well-known English landscape painter and teacher Anthony Van Dyke Copley Fielding.

Libraries for sociability, or libraries of reality? The purpose of British subscription and circulating libraries

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
K. A. Manley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Library History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Card Games ◽  
Hard Evidence

The private subscription and commercial circulating libraries of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England are frequently referred to by historians as ‘libraries for sociability’. But what is a ‘library for sociability’? Does holding card games in a library qualify? Under examination will be whether these kinds of lending libraries contained elements of ‘sociability’ at all or whether the phrase is just an academic conceit. This study will consider hard evidence, and therefore the name of Habermas will not be mentioned. Circulating libraries in popular holiday resorts in particular will be examined as well as the careers of certain individual librarians who aspired to attract the nobility and gentry. Were they really librarians or booksellers or perhaps just fancy goods salesmen? And how did a gang of bank robbers come to be connected to a ‘library for sociability’? How are an Edinburgh mugger and a pair of duellists connected to library history? These and other questions may or may not be answered.

III. Abbot Berkyng's Tapestries and Matthew Paris's Life of St Edward the Confessor

Archaeologia ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 85-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Binski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Textile Production ◽  
Cologne Cathedral ◽  
Edward The Confessor ◽  
The Church

According to John Flete, the fifteenth-century historian of Westminster Abbey, Abbot Richard de Berkyng (d. 1246) bequeathed to the Abbey two curtains or dorsalia which he had procured for the choir, depicting the story of the Saviour and St Edward. Nothing is known about the appearance of these textiles; but they were presumably of fine quality, befitting the patronage of a Treasurer of England, and were evidently intended to hang in the choir stalls. There they remained until after the Dissolution. According to a sixteenth-century commentary with transcriptions of the original texts in the hangings by Robert Hare, discovered by M. R. James (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, MS 391 [611], they were of ‘faire arras worke’, and so were tapestries rather than embroideries; they were also described as ‘wrought in the cloth of Arras’ by Weever in 1631. They hung in the church until 1644, whence they were removed to the chamber of the House of Commons in the Palace; according to Brayley ‘a large remnant’ of the scene of the Circumcision was still preserved in the Jerusalem Chamber at the Abbey in the early nineteenth century. The tapestries were one of the most extensive recorded instances of English thirteenth-century textile production. They provide evidence too for a genre of monastic choir decoration analogous to the lost Old Testament narratives in the choir at Bury St Edmund's and the typological pictures formerly adorning the choir-stalls of Peterborough Abbey. Moreover, they anticipate the mixture of purely narrative material in the surviving fourteenth-century paintings above the dossals of the choir stalls of Cologne Cathedral, and especially the tapestries depicting the lives of St Piat and St Eleutherius from the choir of Tournai Cathedral, Arras work dated 1402.

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