Evolving in an urban landscape, professional baseball attracted a dedicated fan base among the inhabitants of major cities, including ethnic and racial minorities, for whom the game was a vehicle for assimilation. But to what extent were these groups welcomed within the world of baseball, and what effect did their integration--or, as in the case of African Americans, their ultimate inability to integrate--have on the culture of a pastime that had recently become a national obsession? How did their mutual striving for acceptance affect relations between these minorities? (In deep and long-lasting ways, as it turns out.) This book provides a carefully considered portrait of baseball as both a sporting profession--one with quick-changing rules and roles--and as an institution that reinforced popular ideas about cultural identity, masculinity and American exceptionalism.
Evolving in an urban landscape, professional baseball attracted a dedicated fan base among the inhabitants of major cities, including ethnic and racial minorities, for whom the game was a vehicle for assimilation. But to what extent were these groups welcomed within the world of baseball, and what effect did their integration--or, as in the case of African Americans, their ultimate inability to integrate--have on the culture of a pastime that had recently become a national obsession? How did their mutual striving for acceptance affect relations between these minorities? (In deep and long-lasting ways, as it turns out.) This book provides a carefully considered portrait of baseball as both a sporting profession--one with quick-changing rules and roles--and as an institution that reinforced popular ideas about cultural identity, masculinity and American exceptionalism.
In his day, perhaps no one in baseball was better known than Irish-born Timothy Paul "Ted" Sullivan. For 50 years, America's sportswriters sang his praises, genuflected to his genius and bought his blarney by the barrel. Damon Runyon dubbed him "The Celebrated Carpetbagger of Baseball." Cunning, fast-talking, witty and sober, Sullivan was the game's first player agent, a groundbreaking scout who pulled future Hall of Famers from the bushes, an author, a playwright and a baseball evangelist who promoted the game across five continents. He coined the term "fan" and was among the first to suggest the designated hitter--because pitchers were "a lot of whippoorwill swingers." But he was also a convert to the Jim Crow attitudes of his day--black ballplayers were unimaginable to him. Unearthing thousands of contemporaneous newspaper accounts, this first exhaustive biography of "Hustlin'" Ted Sullivan recounts the life and career of one of the greatest hucksters in the history of the game.
SABR 50 at 50 celebrates and highlights the Society for American Baseball Research’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball history. Established in 1971 in Cooperstown, New York, SABR has sought to foster and disseminate the research of baseball—with groundbreaking work from statisticians, historians, and independent researchers—and has published dozens of articles with far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the game. Among its current membership are many Major and Minor League Baseball officials, broadcasters, and writers as well as numerous former players. The diversity of SABR members’ interests is reflected in this fiftieth-anniversary volume—from baseball and the arts to statistical analysis to the Deadball Era to women in baseball. SABR 50 at 50 includes the most important and influential research published by members across a multitude of topics, including the sabermetric work of Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and Bill James, along with Jerry Malloy on the Negro Leagues, Keith Olbermann on why the shortstop position is number 6, John Thorn and Jules Tygiel on the untold story behind Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers, and Gai Berlage on the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team in the 1990s. To provide history and context, each notable research article is accompanied by a short introduction. As SABR celebrates fifty years this collection gathers the organization’s most notable research and baseball history for the serious baseball reader.
By 1900 Maryland's Eastern Shore, along the western side of the Delmarva Peninsula, was acknowledged in the national press as a hotbed of baseball activity. By the 1920s the game was fully ingrained into local community life, central to the summer social season among the towns and villages that measured their worth by the quality of their teams. Providing fresh insight into early 20th century baseball at its grassroots, this book explores the Chesapeake Bay region as a case study for the enthusiasm (and hubris) the game brought to rural American life, in context with national trends and influences.
From the Wild West shows of the nineteenth century to the popular movie Westerns of the twentieth century, one view of an idealized and mythical West has been promulgated. Elyssa Ford suggests that we look beyond these cowboy clichés to complicate and enrich our picture of the American West. Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion takes us from the beachfront rodeo arenas in Hawai‘i to the reservation rodeos held by Native Americans to reveal how people largely missing from that stereotypical picture make rodeo—and America—their own. Because rodeo has such a hold on our historical and cultural imagination, it becomes an ideal arena for establishing historical and cultural relevance. By claiming a place in that arena, groups rarely included in our understanding of the West—African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the LGBT+ community—emphasize their involvement in the American past and proclaim their right to an American identity today. In doing so, these groups change what Americans know about their history and themselves. In her journey through these race- and group-specific rodeos, Ford finds that some see rodeo as a form of escape, a refuge from a hostile outside world. For others, rodeo has become a site of rebellion, a place to proclaim their difference and to connect to a different story of America. Still others, like Mexican Americans and the LGBT+ community, look inward, using rodeo to coalesce and celebrate their own identities. In Ford’s study of these historically marginalized groups, she also examines where women fit in race- and group-specific rodeos—and concludes that even within these groups, the traditional masculinity of the rodeo continues to be promoted. Female competitors may find refuge within alternate rodeos based on their race or sexuality, but they still face limitations due to their gender identity. Whether as refuge or rebellion, rodeos of difference emerge in this book as quintessentially American, remaking how we think about American history, culture, and identity.
This study uses sociological and historical methodologies to analyze the role of sport in the formation of urban identity in Chicago. The author traces the transformation of Chicago from a frontier town to a commercial behemoth, examining its role as an immigration, transportation, and entertainment hub. The author argues that, as a pioneering leader in American sport history, Chicago allowed teams and athletes to forge a unique national and global identity. This thorough and well-researched study makes a major contribution to debates on the social and psychological functions of sport culture.
"Baseball Rebels tells stories of reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America's broader political and social protest movements, including battles against racism, corporate control, worker exploitation, sexism and homophobia, and American militarism"--
Where did all the Germans go? How does a community of several hundred thousand people become invisible within a generation? This study examines these questions in relation to the German immigrant community in New York City between 1880-1930, and seeks to understand how German-American New Yorkers assimilated into the larger American society in the early twentieth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was one of the largest German-speaking cities in the world and was home to the largest German community in the United States. This community was socio-economically diverse and increasingly geographically dispersed, as upwardly mobile second and third generation German Americans began moving out of the Lower East Side, the location of America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), uptown to Yorkville and other neighborhoods. New York’s German American community was already in transition, geographically, socio-economically, and culturally, when the anti-German/One Hundred Percent Americanism of World War I erupted in 1917. This book examines the structure of New York City’s German community in terms of its maturity, geographic dispersal from the Lower East Side to other neighborhoods, and its ultimate assimilation to the point of invisibility in the 1920s. It argues that when confronted with the anti-German feelings of World War I, German immigrants and German Americans hid their culture – especially their language and their institutions – behind closed doors and sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a German community. But becoming invisible did not mean being absorbed into an Anglo-American English-speaking culture and society. Instead, German Americans adopted visible behaviors of a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create, although by no means dominated. Just as the meaning of “German” changed in this period, so did the meaning of “American” change as well, due to nearly 100 years of German immigration.
'A celebration of human idiosyncrasy and of our talent for building shared meaning and solidarity out of the strangest material' – TLS Fans takes the reader on a journey through a constellation of fandoms, and along the way demonstrates some fundamental truths about the human condition. Fascinating and thought-provoking, Fans is a story of communities, of what happens to us when we interact with people who share our passions. The human brain is wired to reach out, and while our groupish tendencies can bring much strife (religious intolerance, racism, war, etc.), they are also the source of some of our greatest satisfactions. Fandoms offer much of the pleasure of tribalism with little of the harm: a feeling of belonging and of shared culture, a sense of meaning and purpose, improved mental well-being, reassurance that our most outlandish convictions will be taken seriously, and the freedom to try to emulate (and dress like) our hero. But acclaimed science writer Michael Bond shows that despite these benefits, the world of fandoms is not without its dark underside, from the “copycat effect” fuelling mass shootings to the delusions that can accompany the parasocial relationships that fans feel they have with their heroes. In Fans, Michael Bond draws on the work of social psychologists and anthropologists to understand how people behave in groups and why such groups have such a profound effect on human culture.
