The Culture and Ethnicity of Nineteenth Century Baseball - by Jerrold I Casway (Paperback)

About the Book

"The emergence of baseball as the "national pastime" established the dynamics of spectator sports. Evolving in an urban landscape, the game attracted a dedicated fan base and enshrined the sports hero as a national celebrity. The effect Irish-American players had on how the game was played and their support of Jim Crow culture shaped baseball"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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.

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.