won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Book Prize.
Zacek applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Thoroughbred Nation: Making America at the Racetrack, 1791-1900, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Thoroughbred Nation recounts the story of Adam Bingaman, a leading planter in Natchez, Mississippi in the mid-19th century, at a time at which the “Natchez Nabobs” were some of the richest men in the United States. It focuses on his friendship with an affluent free man of color and his long-standing and openly acknowledged relationship with an African-American woman whom he had formerly enslaved. Bingaman was for most of his adult life a leading light of horse racing in both Natchez and New Orleans, and it was at the former city’s racetrack that he met and became an intimate of the black barber and entrepreneur William Johnson. After Johnson’s death in 1851, his widow and daughters moved to New Orleans, where the girls became close friends with Bingaman’s mixed-race daughters, and Bingaman helped to administer Johnson’s estate and found an appropriate residential care facility for Johnson’s son, who suffered from mental health problems.Learn more about Thoroughbred Nation at the LSU Press website.
Bingaman and Johnson are two of the main figures in this book’s chapter on the development of racing in Natchez, from its birth as a rough frontier town at the beginning of the 19th century to its emergence in mid-century at the heart of the most profitable plantation region of the antebellum United States. This page, which describes their cross-racial intimacy that began trackside, reflects Thoroughbred Nation’s interest in the ways in which the racetracks of the US in the 19th century were not just sites of sport but social spaces, in which visitors were expected to follow strict codes of behavior that were calibrated for their gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Adam Bingaman was greatly respected in Natchez not only for his wealth and his expertise in the breeding, training, and racing of blooded horses, but for his looks, charm, and intelligence—a Harvard graduate, he not only spoke a half-dozen European languages but famously entertained the politician and diplomat Edward Everett by making a toast to him in fluent Choctaw. These attributes granted him sufficient prestige that his friendship with a man of color and even his relationship with a formerly enslaved woman did not besmirch his reputation as a grand Southern gentleman. But his was the example that proves the rule: throughout Thoroughbred Nation, the reader will witness the endless anxieties of the nation’s “turfmen” as they strove to ensure that the courses that they managed or patronized would be simultaneously profitable and respectable—and a major element of respectability was maintaining strict physical and social boundaries between attendees of both sexes and all races and ranks. The “making America” to which the book’s subtitle alludes remained throughout the 19th century a process centered on upholding social hierarchies, rather than on encouraging a spirit of openness like Bingaman’s, let alone facilitating the democratic spirit on which Americans have prided themselves since independence.
--Marshal Zeringue
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