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Homo Faber-Homo Ludens: Sport History and the Working Class

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Patrick B. Miller
Affiliation:
University of Arizona

Abstract

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Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1993

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References

NOTES

1. Will, George, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

2. See also Hine, Lewis, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (New York, 1977; originally 1932);Google Scholar and Trachtenberg, Alan, America and Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904–1940 (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

3. New York Times, December 7, 1992. See also Zimbalist, Andrew, Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

4. See, for instance, Gould, Stephen Jay, “Dreams That Money Can Buy,” New York Review of Books 39 (11 5, 1992):4145. Others might note the writing of Roger Angell in The New Yorker.Google Scholar

5. Two of those presses, The University of Illinois Press and Manchester University Press, have series devoted to the history of sport. Also noteworthy is much of the research contained in the Journal of Sport History and the International Journal of the History of Sport.

6. James Walvin has described the famous run by W. W. Ellis-the “invention” of rugby— as a late-nineteenth-century creation similar to the Doubleday myth. See Walvin, J., The People's Game: a Social History of British Football (London, 1975), 34.Google Scholar For the history of baseball, see Seymour, Harold, Baseball, 3 vols. (New York, 1960, 1971, 1990);Google ScholarVoight, David Quentin, American Baseball, vols. 1, 2 (Norman, Ok., 1966, 1970), vol. 3 (University Park, Pa., 1983);Google ScholarRiess, Steven A., Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Westport, Conn., 1980);Google ScholarLevine, Peter, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York, 1985);Google Scholar and Kirsch, George B., The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838–1872 (Urbana, 1989).Google Scholar See also Gelber, Steven M., “Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983):322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Hobsbawm, E.J. and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983);Google Scholar two works that emphasize modernization are Guttmann, Allen, From Ritual to Record The Nature of Modern Sports (New York, 1978);Google Scholar and Adelman, Melvin, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–1870 (Urbana, 1986).Google Scholar For (elite) sport as an element in antimodernism, see Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981), chap. 3.Google Scholar

8. Adelman, A Sporting Time; Kirsch, Creation of American Team Sports. See also Kirsch, , “The Rise of Modern Sports: New Jersey Cricketers, Baseball Players, and Clubs, 1845–1860,” New Jersey History 101 (Spring–Summer 1983):5384;Google Scholar and American Cricket: Players and Clubs before the Civil War,” Journal of Sport History II (Spring 1984):2849.Google ScholarFreedman, Stephen, “The Baseball Fad in Chicago, 1865–1870: An Exploration of the Role of Sport in the Nineteenth-Century City,” Journal of Sport History 5 (Summer 1978):4264.Google Scholar

9. See Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984);Google ScholarRodgers, Daniel, The Work Ethic in Industrial America: 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. On the bachelor subculture, the best work is Gorn, Elliott J., The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986).Google Scholar

11. Wilentz, , Chants Democratic; David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 13: “Few words enjoyed more popularity in the nineteenth century than this honorific [“manly”], with all its connotations of dignity, respectability, defiant egalitarianism, and patriarchal male supremacy.”Google Scholar

12. See Pugh, David, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth Century America (Westport, Conn., 1983);Google ScholarRotundo, E. Anthony, “Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770–1920,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983):2833;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993); Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, James, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester, 1987);Google ScholarCarnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde, eds., Meanings For Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990).Google Scholar See also Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991).Google Scholar For Britain, see Segal, Lynne, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990).Google Scholar My discussion of gender dichotomies derives from these studies as well as from Scott, Joan W., “Gender, a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988);Google ScholarSmith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), part II;Google ScholarBloch, Ruth, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (1987):3758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Riess, Steven A., City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana, 1989).Google Scholar See also Hardy, Stephen, How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation, and Community, 1865–1915 (Boston, 1982).Google Scholar

14. On black baseball, see Peterson, Robert, Only the Ball Was White (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970);Google ScholarHolway, John, Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (New York, 1975);Google ScholarHolway, , Blackball Stars: Negro League Pioneers (Westport, Conn., 1988);Google ScholarRogosin, Donn, Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

15. See the intriguing article by Markovits, Andrei S., “The Other ‘American Exceptionalism’: Why Is There No Soccer in the United States?International Journal of the History of Sport 7 (09, 1990):230264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Mangan, J.A., The Games Ethic and Imperialism (London, 1986);Google ScholarChataway, Christopher and Goodheart, Philip, War Without Weapons (London, 1968);Google Scholar and Weber, Eugen, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) chapter 11;Google Scholar for the United States, most assessments dwell on Theodore Roosevelt. See Beale, Howard, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956);Google Scholar and Morris, Edmund, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

17. Holt, Richard, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford, 1989) is the survey text.Google Scholar See Hargreaves, John, Sport, Power, and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Oxford, 1987);Google ScholarWalton, J. and Walvin, James, eds., Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (Manchester, 1983);Google ScholarMason, Tony, Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915 (Brighton, 1980);Google ScholarFishwick, Nicholas, English Football and Society, 1910–1950 (Manchester, 1989);Google ScholarJones, Stephen G., Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918–1939 (London, 1986);Google Scholar and Jones, S.G., Sport, Politics, and the Working Class: Organized Labour and Sport in Inter-War Britain (Manchester, 1988).Google Scholar

18. On soccer hooliganism, see Guttman, Allen, Sports Spectators (New York, 1986);CrossRefGoogle ScholarDunning, E., Murphy, P., and Williams, T., The Roots of Football Hooliganism: An Historical and Sociological Study (London, 1988).Google Scholar

19. See Mangan, J.A. and Park, Roberta J., eds., From ‘Fair Sex’ to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (London, 1987).Google Scholar See also McCrone, Kathleen, Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870–1914 (London, 1988).Google Scholar

20. Malcolmson, R.W.L., Popular Recreation in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1979);Google ScholarTurner, James, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, 1980).Google Scholar

21. For a more expansive treatment of this subject, see Korr, Charles, West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club (London, 1986).Google Scholar

22. Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1983);Google ScholarCohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar See also, Couvaris, Francis G., The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany, 1984);Google ScholarPeiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Workingwomen and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986);Google Scholar and Butsch, Richard, ed. For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (Philadelphia, 1990). Similar arguments also have been made by British practitioners of cultural studies, many of them identified with Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.Google Scholar

23. James, C.L.R., Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963);Google Scholar see also Palmer's, Bryan D. reading of this in Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990).Google Scholar For the criticism of idealized community, see Walker, Clarence, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, 1991), xv;Google ScholarMcEwen, Ellen, “The Ties That Divide,” in Australia Since the Invasion: A People's History, vol. 4, ed. Burgman, V. and Lee, J. (Sydney, 1988), 27.Google Scholar