American Sweepstakes : How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age

from DoctorDebt

Kevin Flynn's "American Sweepstakes" is a fascinating look at how the modern lottery came to be. This book is throughly researched, and does a great job of presenting not only the political pressure and legal issues surrounding the development of the New Hampshire Sweepstakes. Although the book s...

from snash

A fun description of the struggles involved in setting up the first legal state run lottery. The account is somewhat rambling in that it takes the time to give biographies of the major players and events in their lives. I found the diversions added to the human interest of the story.

from ridgeclub

Lotteries are so much a part of daily life in the US it is hard to appreciate the work it took to get the first one established. New Hampshire would be an unlikely candidate for that breakthrough, and the author exploits that perspective to detail not only the chronology of events but also the pl...

from mattries37315

From Powerball to Mega Millions, nearly everyone in the United States has heard about stage-run lotteries, but just a little over 50 years ago that wasn't the case as seen in "American Sweepstakes". In Kevin Flynn's short history of the birth of the New Hampshire Sweepstakes, the beginning of the...

from mrmapcase

It is hard to imagine the U.S. without lotteries, from the multi-state Powerball drawing to scratch off tickets that you can buy from vending machines. But state lotteries are relatively recent, dating back to only 1963 in New Hampshire tied into a horse race. One thing that struck me is that thi...