A Love of History and Horses As many racing fans look forward to the classics, some of us like to look back, preoccupied as much with racing heroes of the past like Harry Bassett and Colin as we are with who will win the big races in 2013. Annie Johnson is one of these people. She runs the Web site Antebellum Turf Times, which looks like a vintage racing broadsheet and contains features such as "How To Catch A Wild Turkey, Circa 1831″ - and the 1845 Constitution of the Adams County, Mississippi, Jockey Club. I caught up with Johnson recently over e-mail as she was heading to Keeneland. What do you do in "real life"? I've worked as a professional writer for more than 15 years in development and fund-raising for charities, more than a decade of which has been entirely freelance, so this project is quite a departure. My writing focus and interest has always steered toward nonfiction, having pursued my undergraduate degree in journalism and later a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California. What made you create the Web site? My Web site was created as part of my effort to grow my author platform, for my research in this area has all been toward the writing of my book in process, which is tentatively titled, Antebellum Turf Times: New Orleans as the Epicenter of America's First National Pastime, Thoroughbred Racing. This book will chronicle the Crescent City's rise from racing obscurity prior to the Civil War. Who are some of your favorite horses and racing figures of the period? My book centers around a group that has been referred to as the "Big Four," members of the Southern planter aristocracy from Louisiana and Mississippi for whom racing was a way of life, and whose "crack nags," or top thoroughbreds, dominated the New Orleans race meetings. But there's an endless number of interesting people who play a role in this story - the enterprising Captain Yelverton N. Oliver of Virginia, who descended upon New Orleans in 1836, resuscitating the city's floundering sport by building the Eclipse Course; there's Kenner's slave jockeys, Chisel'em and Abe Hawkins, both leading riders at the New Orleans tracks, as well as Hark, T.J. Wells" slave trainer; and the race courses themselves even serve as characters for the backdrop of this story, from the primitive plantation course of Monsieur Livaudais, where the city's first official Jockey Club raced in 1823; to the Metairie Course, established in 1838, which reigned supreme until the Civil War. What are the biggest differences between American racing before the Civil War and racing today? The 1823 Great Match Race between the North and South drew an estimated 60,000 spectators to the Union Course on Long Island - the attendance equivalent of an average Breeders" Cup Saturday - with more than one-third of these race goers having traveled by any means possible from the South to support Sir Henry's contest against American Eclipse. This match does demonstrate the vast difference in distance from contemporary racing; three heats at four miles each for a grand total of 12 miles in one afternoon. This was a period of race mania at its finest, and Americans were riveted to the outcome of these "trials of speed." Today, if we're not present for a race we can read about it immediately via the Internet or on Twitter. This [the story of the New Orleans track] is an important story and one for which lives are at stake, as the legends of these turf heroes will otherwise remain buried in the archives, among the miles of microfilm reels and the disintegrating print copies of the turf registers and historic newspapers; it reminds me a favorite line from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: "all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe.