About this item
Highlights
- As baseball was becoming the national pastime, Kansas was settling into statehood, with hundreds of towns growing up with the game.
- Author(s): Mark Eberle
- 408 Pages
- Sports + Recreation, Baseball
Description
About the Book
The story of Kansas baseball includes the full range of topics that dominated the sport's early history--segregation, Sunday sports, night games, and more--from the "Bloody Kansas" era prior to the Civil War to the eve of World War II.Book Synopsis
As baseball was becoming the national pastime, Kansas was settling into statehood, with hundreds of towns growing up with the game. The early history of baseball in Kansas, chronicled in this book, is the story of those towns and the ballparks they built, of the local fans and teams playing out the drama of the American dream in the heart of the country. Mark Eberle's history spans the years between the Civil War-era and the start of World War II, encapsulating a time when baseball was adopted by early settlers, then taken up by soldiers sent west, and finally by teams formed to express the identity of growing towns and the diverse communities of African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. As elsewhere in the country, these teams represented businesses, churches, schools, military units, and prisons. There were men's teams and women's, some segregated by race and others integrated, some for adults and others for youngsters. Among them we find famous barnstormers like the House of David, the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry who played at Fort Wallace in the 1860s, and Babe Didrikson pitching the first inning of a 1934 game in Hays. Where some of these games took place, baseball is still played, and Kansas Baseball, 1858-1941 takes us to nine of them, some of the oldest in the country. These ballparks, still used for their original purpose, are living history, and in their stories Eberle captures a vibrant image of the state's past and a vision of many innings yet to be played--a storied history and promising future that readers will be tempted to visit with this book as an informative and congenial guide.Review Quotes
"Kansas Baseball History, 1858-1941 is a winner. It loads the bases inning after inning, chapter after chapter, with lively player profiles and stories about baseball games, record-setting performances, and town rivalries throughout the state. Taking a full cut and making solid contact time and again, Mark Eberle scores with detailed accounts of women's play, segregated and integrated teams, Indian baseball, minor league vicissitudes, and surviving ballparks."--Joseph L. Price, Genevieve S. Connick Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director, Institute for Baseball Studies, Whittier College
"Mark Eberle's Kansas Baseball, 1858-1941 is a valuable study of the under-appreciated role of baseball as a mirror of the social, cultural, and economic influences in the state as it navigated its formative years. His examination of teams of immigrants, women, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Mexican-Americans is a treat and reveals much about Kansas society and character during the period prior to World War II. The author's impressive use of local and regional newspapers, county and city archives, and recent websites has produced a model study that will not be duplicated. It will be a wonderful book to take on a road trip across Kansas to explore its past."-- John Dreifort, editor of Baseball History from Outside the Lines: A Reader
"A thoroughly engrossing monograph on the history baseball in the state of Kansas from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. Kansas Baseball makes a significant contribution to scholarly research on the national pastime specifically and US society in general. Eberle has uncovered a forgotten world of the history of baseball in the United States."--Annals of Iowa
"This is not just a study of baseball from a single-state focus. the author's insights extend to towns and cities in every state through his lens that intersects baseball and community development."--NINE
"Eberle presents an unusually effective history that will reward professional historians, amateurs of the craft, and fans of the sport. Central to this work are the interactions of Kansans with the sport of baseball and the impact the game had on Kansas communities."--Kansas History
