Richard McGowan: State Lotteries and Legalized Gambling: Painless Revenue or Painful Mirage

Richard McGowan was recently quoted in The New York Times feature story, "States Look for Winning Formulas to Spur Lottery Sales:" With state budgets in crisis and lottery-financed programs like prekindergarten being considered for cuts, the pressure is on to make lottery tickets more attractive to casual scratchers and people who may have never dropped a dollar on a chance before. [...] The key to success is catching a customer’s eye, said Richard McGowan, a management professor at Boston College who studies state gambling. “It’s an impulse buy when you walk into a store,” he said. “It all depends on how aggressive a lottery commissioner wants to be with advertising.” Read that full NYT story here. NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently had Richard McGowan on their show as a guest. Listen to the podcast, "States Gamble On Casinos To Generate Revenue," below.

Daniel Rasmussen: American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt

Harvard Magazine recently wrote:

DANIEL RASMUSSEN ’09 found his senior thesis topic where the history books left off: scattered but brief references to a slave rebellion in New Orleans in 1811 piqued his interest junior year. When the history and literature concentrator realized that, with a militia of some 500 black slaves, this was the single largest and most tactically sophisticated slave revolt in American history, and that not only this fact, but the event itself, had gone largely unexamined, he knew he had his topic. The thesis went on to win a Hoopes Prize for excellence in undergraduate research, but Rasmussen wanted to make sure that the story had readers beyond the prize committee. “This is a story that needs to be told,” he says. “This is a tremendously important moment in American history, and a very important moment in African-American history. It undermines our understanding of slavery as depressing, and of the slaves as victims. These slaves were heroes.” Since graduation, Rasmussen has been working as an analyst at a private equity firm in the Boston area and devoting his free time to expanding his thesis into a book. The result, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, will be published by HarperCollins in January.

Read that full article, here. Check the accompanying blog out as well (good beginning sources for scholars).