Out of the Ballpark
How to Think About Baseball
Seiten
2026
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-778955-1 (ISBN)
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-778955-1 (ISBN)
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Out of the Ballpark strips away the mythology that has accumulated around baseball in the United States to better appreciate the different sites of the sport's development and the various sources of its appeal. It explores baseball's function as a modern entertainment spectacle and moves across time and space to examine its history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders.
From America's Pastime to a global phenomenon--the life of the spectacular game as it is played and celebrated in communities around the world
All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums, players, and stats. While all those details compel insiders and inspire fans, baseball's peculiar and persistent appeal can only be understood by adopting a wider lens. It requires reckoning with the history of structured competition. The classic backyard game of catch between a father and son draws meaning from its associations with the organized sport and its history. The challenge lies less in finding one perfect spot to look, but rather in identifying the many different places where baseball has accumulated significance.
Out of the Ballpark reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.
Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.
From America's Pastime to a global phenomenon--the life of the spectacular game as it is played and celebrated in communities around the world
All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums, players, and stats. While all those details compel insiders and inspire fans, baseball's peculiar and persistent appeal can only be understood by adopting a wider lens. It requires reckoning with the history of structured competition. The classic backyard game of catch between a father and son draws meaning from its associations with the organized sport and its history. The challenge lies less in finding one perfect spot to look, but rather in identifying the many different places where baseball has accumulated significance.
Out of the Ballpark reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of the game by exploring both baseball's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, it abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.
Instead, David M. Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.
David M. Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught courses on society and culture in nineteenth-century America for close to three decades. He is the author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2006); The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are (2021); and (with Rebecca McLennan) Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (2022).
I. Introduction: Locating Baseball
II. Urban Settings
III. Associations
IV. The Rule of Law
V. Manhood
VI. Empires
VII. Color Lines
VIII. Labor and Capital
IX. Spectacle and Media
X. Partisanship
XI. Accounting
XII. Conclusion: Imagination and Fantasy
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 16.6.2026 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 11 b/w |
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 140 x 210 mm |
| Themenwelt | Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport |
| Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-19-778955-2 / 0197789552 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-19-778955-1 / 9780197789551 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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