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Title: Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper by Paul E. Johnson ISBN: 0-8090-8389-2 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Jumping into Jacksonian Democracy
Comment: If you have never heard of Sam Patch, it is because you are not living in the nineteenth century. Sam Patch was America's first celebrity daredevil, someone who made his fortune and his fame by spectacularly endangering his life, jumping from waterfalls. Paul E. Johnson, in _Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper (Hill and Wang), has not exactly brought Patch back to life. As Johnson explains, people like Patch did not have linear careers that lent their lives to being told as stories; they had episodes, not biographies. Patch only lived thirty years, and jumped professionally only for the last two of those, but he did have a wonderful career, and even some meaning within American history and sociology. Johnson has, though Patch's story, examined some details of Jacksonian America, industrialization, philosophies of art, and aspects of fame from self-endangerment and self-promotion rather than self-improvement and civic involvement. Patch was, after all, a lout and a drunkard, but it must mean something that he achieved such a level of fame that his feats could be cited by Melville, Hawthorne and Poe. Even Andrew Jackson's favorite steed was named Sam Patch.
Sam was around seven years old when he took up work in a mill; families in the early eighteenth century were being drawn to mill towns since mothers and children could easily get work. He was good at the work, and fiercely independent in the craft of "mule spinner". The independence manifested itself in his jumping as well. He learned the craft of jumping as other boys did, but when he moved to another mill town, his jumping acquired a social and political aspect that endeared him to the populace. He jumped to spite a rising industrialist in Paterson, New Jersey, and then in support of his own class when there was a dispute over how the town should celebrate the Fourth of July, and jumped again during the first labor walkout. People loved the jumps, and newspapers reported them. Patch became a working-class hero. He went on to jump into Niagara Falls twice, and finally in Rochester. On 13 November 1829, he took a plunge into the Genesee Falls, into which he had jumped successfully a week before. He was drunk, and hit the water out of control. It was months before the body was found, but respectable Americans had found a new cause to rail against; one preacher spoke of the "strange and savage curiosity" of the crowds who came to see the jumps, and another told his Sunday school class "... that any of them who had witnessed Patch's last leap would be judged guilty of murder by God."
Sam Patch could have been an emblem against the masses, but it did not work out that way. He became the subject of poetry, comic stories, and stage plays. "What the Sam Patch!" became a common way of swearing. There was a Sam Patch cigar. He has even recently been the subject of a novel. Rochester has welcomed his memory as if it were that of a favorite son, and you can buy souvenirs at Sam's Gift Patch. There are those who insist that any American Dream must be built on hard work, domestic harmony, and sobriety. Johnson's able and well-researched portrait, with its many digressions into aspects of our fledgling democracy, shows a different sort of dream and a new sort of celebrity. Americans, bless their hearts, had from the beginning a delight in one who tweaked the nose of his betters and got fame for lots of wrong reasons.
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Title: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit ISBN: 0670031763 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 27 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial by Suzanne Lebsock ISBN: 0393042014 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 by Nat Brandt, R. Perry Duis, Cathlyn Schallhorn , Perry R. Duis ISBN: 0809324903 Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 11, 1857 by Sally Denton ISBN: 0375412085 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 17 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: A Nation under Our Feet : Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn ISBN: 0674011694 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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