"An award-winning historian offers a provocative alternative history of America that traces how luck, chance, and gambling have shaped, indeed defined, our national character Hailed by The New York Review of Books as ""one of cultural history's masters of linking popular moods and ideas with arts, philosophies, industries, and commodities,"" prizewinning historian Jackson Lears has now written the most important, most wide-ranging, and most original book of his career. In Something for Nothing, Lears documents how America's culture of control is inextricably entwined with its culture of chance. Conventional wisdom has it that the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-control is what made America great, but a deep, seldom acknowledged reverence for luck runs through our history as well. Americans have embraced the seductive whims of chance, from African fortune-telling to Puritan folk superstitions right up to the current resurgence of casinos and lotteries. Drawing on a vast body of research,Lears ranges through the entire sweep of American history as he uncovers the hidden influence of risk taking, conjuring, soothsaying, and sheer
