January 28, 2019: Great (Sports) Debates: Who Invented Baseball?

[Sunday, February 3^rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday. For this year’s Super Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your opinion into the mix in comments, please!]

On what’s not the case about the sport’s origins, and two interesting details of the (uncertain) real story.

So apparently Abner Doubleday had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of baseball. I’m not gonna pretend for a second that I knew that before researching this post—indeed, blog completists might remember that I highlighted Doubleday as at least a strong contender for the title in this long-ago post on Thomas Dyja’s Play for a Kingdom (if you are really that long-standing and attentive of a reader, please please please leave a comment or email me and say hi!). But while former baseball player, club executive, and sporting goods entrepreneur Albert Spalding really pushed the narrative of Doubleday as the sport’s inventor—going so far as to commission his friend and former National League President Abraham Mills to “investigate” the question, leading to the highly suspect Mills Commission report of December 1907—the truth is that there is no specific evidence in Doubleday’s life or writings, or any peripheral materials, to support the myth. That’s particularly ironic because the Mills Commission identified Cooperstown, NY as the site of Doubleday’s invention (in the equally fabricated year of 1839), leading to the eventual location of the Baseball Hall of Fame in that town.

Doubleday’s lack of involvement with the sport’s invention is far more certain than the question of when baseball was invented, and by whom. Indeed, what is far more definite is the late 19^th and early 20^th century featuring warring camps, and that those camps were often explicitly linked to the ongoing rivalry between England and America. The English historians traced the sport’s origins to various traditional folk games, from archaic games like “stoolball” and “trap ball” to the more familiar (and still played) parallel sports of cricket and rounders. Their American rivals acknowledge these antecedents and influences, but focus instead on more direct references in early American texts and documents to games like “baste ball” (mentioned in the 1786 diary of Princeton University student John Rhea Smith), or to “baseball” being included (alongside “wicket, cricket, batball” and others) in a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield, MA. In truth, what these various historical examples and details indicate is that the sport developed over centuries, through various iterations and stages, and was played in both England and America for many years before being standardized and professionalized (on which more in a moment). But that’s not as sexy as a fight to the death between Revolutionary rivals, so I’ll let the transatlantic diamond turf war proceed unchecked.

Apologies to my EnglishStudying colleagues and friends, but it was more definitely in an American setting that the sport’s rules were first laid down in a more standardized way. That setting was New York City in September 1845, where the Knickerbocker Club and its officers Alexander Cartwright, William Wheaton, and William Tucker published a set of rules that came to be known as (duh) the Knickerbocker rules. These rules were close enough to the modern game that in 1953 Congress credited Cartwright as the sport’s inventor, which was a total slap in the face to the Williams but that’s another story for another post. But in any case I think we can all agree that the most compelling thing about the Knickerbockers was their decision later in 1845 to move their home games to Hoboken, NJ’s Elysian Fields, which remains the most impressively named field or stadium I’ve ever encountered. As I’ve highlighted in just about every post I’ve written about baseball in this space, the sport captures certain fundamental, pastoral, idyllic American images in a legendary, mythological way that defies precise histories, which might just explain why the history of its own invention remains and likely will always remain an open debate.

Next debate tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other great debates you’d highlight?

January 26-27, 2019: Crowd-sourced Af Am Life Writing

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ve AmericanStudied African American lives in texts. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post on the responses and nominees of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

Shil Sen follows up Monday’s post, writing, “Nice! Equiano should totally be required reading in US schools and colleges.”

For a great piece on Equiano’s book and those exact kinds of questions, see also L.D. Burnett at the USIH blog!

Other suggestions:

Mark Lawton shares, “This is probably an obvious choice, but the autobiography of Frederick Douglass will always stand out as one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. I remember reading it in junior year in high school and it always stuck with me.”

Andy Cornick highlights, “Soul on Ice, Manchild in the Promised Land, and, I'm not kidding,
Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.”

Adam Newman Tweets, “Two somewhat complicated (due to genre) examples I would suggest are John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. Both use memoir/autobiography but as material for analysis of contemporary & historical issues of race.” He adds, “Both are pretty freaking amazing and Wideman’s in particular felt largely overlooked perhaps because he is of an older generation though the book itself is truly a tour de force. Meanwhile Cottom’s book is amazing and thankfully getting the attention it rightly deserves.”

Matthew Teutsch writes, “I would say Wideman's Brothers and Keepers. That is a very powerful book. I'm also thinking about works such as John Marrant's narrative or even something like Iceberg Slim's The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim. Both works highlights different periods and aspects of Black life.”

Finally, one of the most acclaimed recent works of African American biography has to be Imani Perry’s new Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018).

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?

January 25, 2019: African American Life Writing: Three Recent Works

[For this year’s MLK Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On a trio of recent works that exemplify 21^st century African American life writing.

1)      Between the World and Me (2015): I’ve written a good bit already about Ta-Nehisi Coates in this space (and other spaces), and would certainly argue that his talents and significance extend well beyond any individual book. Moreover, Between isn’t nearly as straightforward a memoir as Coates’s first book, the story of his childhood and father The Beautiful Struggle (2008). That book is certainly worth your time as well, but I’m not sure there’s a better work of 21^st century non-fiction than Between—and it is certainly life writing, if it also puts that life in conversation with another life (that of Coates’s teenage son, to whom it is written) and just about every imaginable context and frame. Seriously, if you haven’t read this book yet, do so!

2)      Negroland (2015): Published in the same year as Coates’s book, New School Professor Margo Jefferson’s Negroland is a much more traditional memoir, the story of her upbringing among the African American upper middle class in the 1950s and 60s. But like all of the best life writing, Jefferson’s book draws us into a very specific world, in this case one that has been largely absent from American narratives and collective memories. Jefferson is celebratory and critical of that elite African American community in equal measure, and most of all uses it, as all great memoirists do, to tell a story that is at once intensely personal and profoundly representative of American issues and histories.

3)      2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014): Putting a rap album on a list of life writing works might seem like an intentionally provocative or contrarian move, but I don’t mean it as such; albums aren’t the same as books, but it’s certainly possible to tell a life story through music, and that’s exactly what J. Cole does in his magisterial 2014 album. As I argued in that hyperlinked post, I’d call Cole’s album a magnus opus for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and movement, one of the first artistic texts in this 2010s era to both represent an individual life within that frame and to grapple with the social and cultural contexts around such a life. It’s quite simply one of the great and vital 21^st century African American and American autobiographies.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?