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Paperback Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper Book

ISBN: 0809083884

ISBN13: 9780809083886

Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

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Format: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

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Book Overview

The true history of a legendary American folk hero

In the 1820s, a fellow named Sam Patch grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, working there (when he wasn't drinking) as a mill hand for one of America's new textile companies. Sam made a name for himself one day by jumping seventy feet into the tumultuous waters below Pawtucket Falls. When in 1827 he repeated the stunt in Paterson, New Jersey, another mill town, an even larger audience gathered to cheer on the daredevil they would call the Jersey Jumper. Inevitably, he went to Niagara Falls, where in 1829 he jumped not once but twice in front of thousands who had paid for a good view.

The distinguished social historian Paul E. Johnson gives this deceptively simple story all its deserved richness, revealing in its characters and social settings a virtual microcosm of Jacksonian America. He also relates the real jumper to the mythic Sam Patch who turned up as a daring moral hero in the works of Hawthorne and Melville, in London plays and pantomimes, and in the spotlight with Davy Crockett-a Sam Patch who became the namesake of Andrew Jackson's favorite horse.

In his shrewd and powerful analysis, Johnson casts new light on aspects of American society that we may have overlooked or underestimated. This is innovative American history at its best.
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Customer Reviews

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Rated 5 stars
Book was in perfect condition.

I bought this book used, but when I received it, it was in perfect condition. My child needed it for a class that she was joining mid-semester. The book is no longer being printed. However, while other students were still waiting on the arrival of their books ordered from another bookstore, she was in class with her copy in a little over a week with standard shipping.

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Rated 5 stars
Excellent biography and social history

This is a biography of Sam Patch, the famous jumper from high places into swirling chasms. Yet it's more than a biography; it's also a social history of the times (1820s) and the places where Sam made his daring leaps (Paterson, NJ, Niagara Falls, and Rochester, NY). Sam's early life was spent working in the cotton mills of first, Pawtucket, RI, and then Paterson, NJ. He learned the "art" (Sam's word, and an important one...

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Rated 4 stars
Character(s) Make America Great

Sam Patch was an American original who escaped my attention for forty-eight years. Professor Johnson's study of this mostly forgotten, irreverant showman has piqued this reader's thirst for more of the bold, eccentric and sometimes ambivalent personalities that have shaped this nation in often subtle ways. Not long after completing the author's chronology of the Patch family's slide from the respectability of the rural...

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Rated 5 stars
Jumping into Jacksonian Democracy

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...

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