{"id":1576,"date":"2011-09-08T13:28:52","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T03:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com\/?p=1576"},"modified":"2011-09-08T13:28:52","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T03:28:52","slug":"prize-for-playing-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/updates\/prize-for-playing-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Prize for &#8220;Playing the Numbers&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.arts.nsw.gov.au\/index.php\/funding-and-support\/for-individuals\/fellowships-scholarships-awards\/nsw-premiers-history-awards\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1577\" title=\"NSW Prize\" src=\"http:\/\/digitalharlemblog.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/09\/nsw-prize.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"179\" height=\"80\" \/><\/a>Our book, <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com\/playing-the-numbers-the-book\/\"><em>Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars<\/em><\/a>, won the General History Prize at the 2011 NSW Premier\u2019s History Awards.<\/p>\n<p>The prize citation read:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Telling the story of New York\u2019s gaming underworld in the first half of the last century, this is a brilliant work of recuperative cultural history. It has taken a forgotten aspect of New York gambling history, contemptuously dismissed as \u2018nigger pool\u2019, to recreate a complete social underworld \u2013 a dynamic, insouciant Black American cultural and urban topography of the streets.<\/p>\n<p>Gambling a few pennies or shillings on numbers was the black economy of the interwar years; it enabled some black people to make themselves millionaires, and many more ordinary black folk to ease the psychic pains of the worst economic depression in history.\u00a0 The success of the numbers system meant, too, that they had to fight to defend their business from being taken over by white racketeers using political influence and the machinery of violence.\u00a0 Digging into forgotten archives the authors have recovered the lost worlds of the poor, the fugitive, the illiterate and the criminal.\u00a0 This is a work of scholarship that conveys the excitement and flair of a thriller.\u00a0 It tells a wholly original story based on research that has long been though impossible to find.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our book, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars, won the General History Prize at the 2011 NSW&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[124,127,193,217],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updates","tag-gambling","tag-harlem","tag-nsw-premiers-history-prize","tag-playing-the-numbers"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paM3Ks-pq","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drstephenrobertson.com\/digitalharlemblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}