Lears, the Board of Governors Professor of American Studies at Rutgers, said the idea of studying gambling in America first came to him on a subway platform in New York in 1994.
Luck involves the playfulness in gambling, the tension between risk and reward.
Fortune implies the larger associations of the word, the belief in magic and cosmic portents which many early Americans displayed by carrying charms or amulets, or hanging horseshoes or other banes to evil spirits outside their doors.