History
All Fours is among the oldest extant card games in England. Its first known description was in Charles Cotton's Compleat Gamester of 1674, where the game was reported as popular in Kent. It is probably of Dutch ancestry, and David Parlett suggests that it played a role with the association of the name Jack with the card rank that was originally known only as the knave.
In the 19th century, the game was taken to America and became popular among the African Americans on slave plantations. Also called Seven up, it gave rise to other variants such as Pitch and Auction Pitch, which probably developed in the New England States, Pedro, and California Jack, also known as High-Low-Jack. Modern descendants include Don and Phat, developed in Britain and Ireland. The game is still played in north-west England and Wales, and it has become the national game of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.
Read more about this topic: All Fours
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)