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c h a p t e r o n e HISTORIES In 1881 Iroquois became the first American-bred horse to win the Epsom Derby. He was a small horse, less than fifteen hands two inches high, but he had proved that it was possible for a horse to cross the Atlantic and beat the English horses in their most prestigious race. English journalists, perhaps mindful that their own champions had been bullied out of their birthright by a parvenu, were unimpressed by Iroquois, describing him as ‘‘a rough and ready sort of a colt.’’ On the other hand, the American horse racing fraternity was triumphant, boasting that ‘‘the victory is a grand one and outside of the success, it goes far to prove that, American bred horses are not inferior to the English.’’ Iroquois’s win reflected a rivalry between the United Kingdom and the United States racing worlds made possible by changes in transport. The two sports had developed in uneasy tandem, employing the same breed of horse and, at first, identical rules of conduct. They were also significantly different.∞ Much of racing history has been written by insiders using their privileged access to produce uncritical, celebratory images of the sport. Certain groups have also received more attention than others: the involvement of the upper classes as owners and breeders and that of the working class as spectators and bettors has been extensively documented, for example. The roles of the middle classes, people of color, and women have received far less attention. In the past ten years, historians including Mike Huggins in the UK and Edward Hotaling in the US have checked this trend. The involvement in racing of people from a wide variety of backgrounds is now well documented, as are the regional and local variations that occurred within national traditions. A more nuanced history has replaced the nostalgia for the past that ran 2 h o r s e p e o p l e through racing’s most widely cited historical documents, and this has reinvigorated the study of racing society in its broadest sense. This new approach and data are used here to connect the development of flat racing in the UK with its export to the US. These histories are usually told separately; however, it should be apparent that the connections between racing in the two countries today have deep roots. Connections and discontinuities are highly significant in this context. In both nations, racing has been used to preserve distinctions between groups of people and to express these differences in competitive display. It has also been used to unite the ‘‘motley multitude’’ that has little else in common beyond a desire to take an interest, financial or otherwise, in competition between fine horses. The differences between the two horse cultures emerge from distinctive origins, histories, and technologies. By the time racing was exported to the American colonies it had already begun to change: from the exclusive gentleman’s pursuit it had once been, to the national sport and gambling medium it is today.≤ The origins of flat racing in its modern form are conventionally traced to two events that are often conflated: the inception of the Newmarket Town Plate and the use of Thoroughbred horses. There are problems with this story. Charles II established the Town Plate in 1665 (the first running took place the following year); the Byerley Turk, first of the three Thoroughbred foundation stallions to be imported to England, did not arrive until 1689. The horses raced by Charles II and his courtiers were therefore not yet Thoroughbreds. The Town Plate is viewed as the predecessor of modern flat racing on the grounds that it had rules and more than two runners. Nevertheless, it was a contest of between two and four heats of four miles each, under weights of twelve stone, a very different kind of contest from flat racing today. As the early records of racing contained in the Sporting Calendars indicate, the rise of a particular kind of competition between horses in England, which would eventually be exported to the rest of the world, was characterized by false starts, competing visions, and tenacious alternatives. The changes that led to the dominance of one form of racing over another were primarily social and economic. The idea that racing in its modern form was the result of a serendipitous combination of a particularly horsy royal family with a fast breed of horse is only one...

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