| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jackson Lears. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking. 2003. Pp. ix, 392. $27.95.
Anyone who enters a casino today walks into a space long made magical by promises of self-transformation. Luxurious interiors invoke materialist dreams of heaven that date back to the antebellum period. Slot machines make promises encoded in mana-conjuring glyphs: cornucopias in the nineteenth century, Elvis Presley today. Once the chips are down and the wheel spins, past, present, and future collapse in a moment of sweaty anticipation. This moment, according to Jackson Lears, involves more than the throwing away of good money. It represents a playful alternative to an official culture of control, a rebellious yearning for a conversion experience, grace freely granted apart from dominant ideals of self-control and meritocracy.	1
These rebellious yearnings, according to Lears, have survived centuries of efforts to banish chance from American culture. In the seventeenth century, evangelical rationalists attacked luck with an ordered logic of providentialism, a worldview in which all unfolded according to a divine plan and nothing occurred by chance. For Puritan merchants and Christian slave traders, winning was a sign of God's love, success a measure of individual merit. In this context, a culture of luck adhered to older traditions, emerging from a synthesis of European, African-American, and Indian folk beliefs. For people near the bottom of the social order, the world remained chaotic and fraught with risk. They tossed shells, created stick bundles, and crafted fetishes to read the whims of fortune, to conjure mana—luck made material, palpable, and accessible.	. . .

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