Playing for Keeps : : A History of Early Baseball / / Warren Jay Goldstein.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Goldstein, Warren Jay,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: 20th Anniversary Edition
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (208 p.)

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century.Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades.The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- I. The Culture of Organized Baseball, 1857-1866 -- 1. The Base Ball Fraternity -- 2. Excitement and Self-Control -- 3. The "Manly Pastime" -- II. Amateurs into Professionals, 1866-1876 -- 4. Growth, Division, and "Disorder" -- 5. "Revolving" and Professionalism -- 6. The National Game -- 7. Amateurs in Rebellion -- 8. Professional Leagues and the Baseball Workplace -- Epilogue: Playing for Keeps -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index