The Culture and Ethnicity of Nineteenth Century Baseball

by Jerrold I. Casway

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786498901
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	05/29/2017
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jerrold I. Casway is a professor emeritus of history at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. The author of two books, he has published more than sixty articles covering seventeenth-century Irish history and nineteenth-century baseball topics.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
 1. Who Played the Game?
 2. The Irish and Jim Crow Baseball
 3. A Line Is Drawn in Pennsylvania
 4. Before Greenberg There Was Pike
 5. Ted Sullivan and Baseball’s Hibernian Spirit
 6. From Famine Fields to the Ball Fields and the Front Office
 7. The Pedigrees of Nineteenth Century Managers
 8. Ballplayer: A Seasonal Occupation
 9. Two Fathers for Philadelphia Baseball
10. Intemperance on the Emerald Diamond
11. The Ladies They Will All Turn Out
12. “A Game Played by Idiots for Morons”
13. Root, Root, Rooting for the Home Team
14. In Open Fields and on Wooden Planks
15. Huzzah for the Class of ’45
Epilogue
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This excellent book details how the new, extremely popular sport of baseball was a microcosm of 19th-century American culture and describes how the social and cultural forces of the time influenced the development and growth of the sport.... This scholarly, informative, yet easy-to-read volume includes an excellent bibliography and will be a fine addition to academic library collections....recommended”—Choice; “[This] much needed volume on nineteenth century baseball analyzes the culture of the sport.... Casway successfully navigates the minefield that is history at the intersection of ethnicity and race”—Sport in American History; “well organized...highly recommended...satisfying...enjoyable read”—Nineteenth Century Research Committee, SABR; “Casway takes his readers through a neat and thorough tour of both 19th-century baseball from its early structured-team origins of the 1840s up through the turn of the 20th-century, and the changing ethnicity of North America...highly recommended”—Nineteenth Century Notes; “This book provides important insights into baseball during the nineteenth century. The author makes good use of both primary and secondary source material and demonstrates a very good grasp of the sport’s evolution and its impact on American culture.”—David K. Wiggins, co-author, The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport.

From the Publisher