The Historiography of American Sport

Steven A. Riess

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
7 (Summer 1992). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1992, Organization of American Historians
 

A valuable introduction to the study of sport history is Allen Guttmann's From Ritual To Record, The Nature of Modern Sports which examines the nature of modern sport by analyzing the characteristics of sport in pre-modern, ancient, medieval, and modern times. The standard survey of American sport is Benjamin Rader's excellent and indispensable American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports. Rader argues that American sport has evolved through four eras, "The Age of Folk Games" in colonial America, "The Rise of Organized Sports" in the nineteenth century, "The Ascendancy of Organized Sports" from 1890 to 1950, and the more recent "Age of Televised Sports." Rader does a superb job in analyzing the rise of a sporting ethic, the development of sports rules, and the commercialization and profession-alization of sport, all in the context of the rise of industrial capitalism, giving appropriate attention to the influence of class, ethnicity, and gender. While there is no bibliography, the text is amply footnoted, and major secondary sources for the principal topics are generously cited at the beginning of the appropriate chapters. See also Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports. For a more specialized overview of sport history since World War II, see Randy Roberts and James Olson, Winning is the Only Thing: Sports in America since 1945, which emphasizes topics like television, international sport, and professional sport.

Instructors interested in primary sources should consult both Steven Riess's The American Sporting Experience: A Historical Anthology, which consists of a combination of secondary articles and primary documents and includes a useful bibliography, and Peter Levine's American Sport: A Documentary History. Both are geared to classroom use. A particularly good source for primary documents is George Kirsch, Sports in North America: A Documentary History, 1840-1860, the first of a ten volume series to be published by Academic International. Selections include rules and regulations, club and association by-laws and constitutions, contemporary articles, and press accounts of major contests.

The literature is richest on baseball, the national pastime, and the first sport to get serious scholarly attention. The place to begin is with Harold Seymour's well-written trilogy. Baseball: The Early Years and Baseball: The Golden Age examines the transformation of baseball from a simple antebellum boy's game to a popular commercialized spectator sport exclusively operated and controlled by team owners. Bringing the narrative up to 1930, Seymour regards baseball's development as a reflection of contemporary industrial capitalism. A third volume, Baseball: The People's Game, examines sandlot, inter-collegiate, and other forms of amateurism, professional black baseball, and women's participation. Much of Seymour's work is paralleled by David Voigt's American Baseball, a three volume work that brings the history of major league baseball up to the 1980s. For single volume histories, see Charles A. Alexander, Our Game: An American Baseball History, and especially Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America's National Game. Seymour's and Voigt's analysis of the early days of organized baseball have been supplanted by younger scholars, most notably Melvin L. Adelman in A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870, George Kirsch in The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket 1838-72, and Warren Goldstein in Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball, who demonstrates how a boy's game became a manly modern middle-class pastime that supplanted cricket as the leading team sport.

There are several specialized studies of baseball. For an examination of how baseball's ideology influenced public behavior at the turn-of-the-century when it was unchallenged as the national pastime, see Riess's Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. This book examines the politics of baseball, the composition of crowds, the history of ballparks, and the social origins of major leaguers by studying professional baseball in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. Particularly informative on nineteenth-century politics is Ted Vincent, Mudville's Revenge: The Rise and Fall of American Sport, a much overlooked gem. For additional studies of baseball and cultural values, see Richard Crepeau's Baseball: America's Diamond Mind, 1919-1941 and Leverett T. Smith Jr.'s The American Dream and the National Game. On the composition of crowds, see Kirsch, The Creation of Team Sports, and Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports who argue that commercialized baseball sought and attracted a largely middle-class crowd. Their arguments contradict the conclusions of Allen Guttmann's Sports Spectators which asserts that spectators were mainly working class. On the business history of baseball, see Peter Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport; Eugene C. Murdock, Ban Johnson: Czar of Baseball; Neil Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (a work that admires Walter O'Malley's business acumen); James E. Miller, The Baseball Business: Pursuing Pennants and Profits in Baltimore; Gerald W. Scully, The Business of Major League Baseball; and Bruce Kuklick, To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976. See also the essays in Roger G. Noll, ed., Government and the Sports Business and in Paul Staudohar and J. A. Mangan, eds. American Professional Sports: Social, Historical, Economic and Legal Perspectives, which both examine all the major professional team sports. On labor relations, see Lee Lowenfish, The Imperfect Diamond: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars. Excellent interviews of early twentieth-century ballplayers appear in Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times. For biographies of prominent players see Charles C. Alexander, Ty Cobb and John J. McGraw; Jack B. Moore, Joe DiMaggio: A Bio-bibliography; Robert Creamer, Casey and Babe; and Marshall Smelser, The Life That Ruth Built.

The fascinating history of the Negro Leagues was first explored in Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White. This topic has relied heavily on oral history since written records on African-American baseball are scarce. Donn Rogosin's Invisible Man: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues explored how local teams became important community institutions that were operated by black entrepreneurs involved in the numbers rackets. For a detailed study of one of the best black teams, see Janet Bruce, The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. Rob Ruck's Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh shows how baseball and other sports helped Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods develop a sense of community. For a superb history of the integration of professional baseball, see Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, which can be supplemented with Joseph T. Moore, Pride Against Prejudice: The Biography of Larry Doby. Informative, but less rigorous is Arthur Ashe's A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the Afro-American Athlete, 1619-1986, 3 volumes. John Holway's Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues provides a fine collection of interviews with former Negro Leaguers.

The scholarship on other sports is far less thorough, although there has been some very good work done on boxing, a sport that was generally illegal in the nineteenth century, and only widely permitted since the 1920s. The best place to begin is Elliott J. Gorn's masterful The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America, which examines pugilism as an exemplar of manliness and as an important element of the subterranean bachelor working-class culture of American cities. The sporting fraternity that working-class pugilists represented posed a serious threat to prevailing middle-class Victorians. Incidentally, the issue of sport and manliness has received considerable attention. See, for example, Peter Stearns, Be A Man! Males in Modern Society; and Joe L. Dubbert, A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition. Boxing's position as a nexus between urban machine politics and organized crime is analyzed in Riess's City Games which also gives considerable attention to the social origins of boxers, the composition of crowds, and the arenas where major bouts were fought between 1870 and 1960. The history of boxing since the 1920s is sketched out in Jeffrey Sammons's Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, a study that is very critical of prize fighting. Sammons is particularly deft in his analyses of black boxers and the physical dangers of the sport. An informative journalistic account of boxing in the 1950s is Barney Nagler's James Norris and the Decline of Boxing. For very fine biographies of prominent pugilists, see Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America; Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes and his Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler; Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson; and Anthony O. Edmonds, Joe Louis. A comparison of the careers and personalities of Johnson, Louis, and Ali are certain to stimulate classroom discussions.

Football has received surprisingly little attention. Ronald A. Smith in Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics provides material on inter collegiate football. Smith shows how the athletic programs at Oxford and Cambridge influenced elite American college sport, which was commercialized right from the start and shortly thereafter highly rationalized. Smith also demonstrates that the development of college sports was always tied to the American belief in freedom. Very informative on the impact of big time football on the college campus is Robin Lester's "The Rise, Decline and Fall of Football at the University of Chicago, 1892-1940" (Ph.D diss., University of Chicago, 1974). On the integration of intercollegiate football, see Richard Pen-nington, Breaking the Ice: The Racial Integration of Southwestern Conference Football. Professional football has also received little attention, although an informative (albeit overlong) biography is Michael O'Brien, Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi. See also John Car-roll's new Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement, a biography of one of the first black All-Americans, and the first black NFL head coach. Martin Duberman's biography, Paul Robeson, gives minimal attention to Robeson's athletic career.

On early professional basketball, see Robert W. Peterson, Cage to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball's Early Years. There is a lot of worthwhile information on men's and women's professional basketball in Vincent's Mudville's Revenge. Also useful is the work of journalists Pete Axthelm, The City Game: Basketball in New York From the World Championship Knicks to the World of Playgrounds; and Rick Telander, Heaven is a Playground. The tribulations of Connie Hawkins's journey from the slums of Brooklyn to the NBA, with detours caused by his presumed involvement with basketball gambling scandals in the 1960s, is poignantly and sympathetically told in David Wolf, Foul! The literature on track remains pretty sparce, but I would recommend Vincent, Mudville's Revenge, which is particularly good on nineteenth-century working-class track and field, and John Cumming, Runners and Walkers: A Nineteenth-Century Chronicle.

In addition to dealing with the principal sports, attention should also be devoted to particular topics and eras. Students are usually less interested in the colonial period for which the literature is relatively thin. On colonial sport, see Hans Peter Wagner, Puritan Attitudes Toward Recreation in Early Seventeenth Century New England and the various articles by Nancy Struna in scholarly periodicals like the Journal of Sport History. A seminal study for the antebellum era is Aldeman's A Sporting Time which examines the modernization of sport in New York between 1820 and 1870. Adelman gives special attention to the rise of a positive sports creed that justified participation in clean sport as morally uplifting, character building, and promoting public health. The author's superb research into baseball, cricket, harness racing, and thoroughbred racing indicates that the rise of sport pre-dated the Civil War era. There is additional information about boxing and pedestrianism and water, animal, and leisure sports. John Dizikes's Sportsmen and Gamesmen is an interesting study of antebellum sporting men. He argued that the ideas and behavior of antebellum sportsmen changed from the values of sportsmen to gamesmen. While elite sportsmen accepted the written rules and unwritten conventions of a game, bourgeois gamesmen were manipulative and tried to bend rules whenever they could in order to win. Less informative is Patricia C. Click, The Spirit of the Times: Amusements in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore, Norfolk and Richmond.

Historians are especially concerned with the relationship of major cities to the rise of sport and its subsequent evolution. Dale Somers, The Rise of Sport in New Orleans, 1850-1900, presented the first urban study of sport, focusing on a wide-open southern city where all sports--including horse racing and boxing--flourished, and where sport was even integrated. Recent scholars, such as Adelman, have gone beyond examining the city as the principal site of American sport, analyzing sport as both the product of urbanization and as an independent variable which influenced the process of city building. Stephen Hardy's How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation and Community, 1865-1915, examined such topics as interscholastic sports, elite sports clubs, boxing heroes, and park use in post-Civil War Boston. On working-class use of municipal parks see also Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Riess's City Games shows how demographic growth, evolving spatial arrangements, social reform, the formation of class and ethnic subcultures, the expansion of urban government, and the rise of political machines and crime syndicates all interacted to influence the development of American sport.

While scholars have concentrated on urban sport, only a few studies exist on rural sport. In rural sport historiography, works on Southern rural sport include Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920; and Elliott J. Gorn's " 'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry" in the American Historical Review (1985). On the ideology of farm women's health and sporting activities, see Linda J. Borish, "Farm Females, Fitness, and the Ideology of Physical Health in Antebellum New England," in Agricultural History (1990). Janice Beran has explored rural women in sport focusing on Iowa women in "Playing to the Right Drummer: Girl's Basketball in Iowa, 1893-1927," in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (1985). The sporting experiences of rural Americans have yet to be integrated into the sport history literature.

Considerable attention has been given to the history of sport and health, undoubtedly a product of the 1980s fitness mania. See James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers; Harvey Green, Fit For America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society; Martha Verbrugge, Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston; Donald Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality: 1880-1910; Kathryn Grover, ed., Fitness in American Culture: Images of Health, Sport, and the Body, 1830-1940; and Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden. For a collection of recent essays on the history of sports medicine drawn largely from the Journal of Sport History, see Jack W. Berryman and Roberta Park, eds., Sport and Exercise Medicine: Essays in the History of Sports Medicine. Particularly informative is Terry Todd's study of steroid use.

The relationship between sport and education in formal and informal settings has received considerable attention. Historians have analyzed the acculturating function of organized sport through such adult-directed institutions as the YMCA, settlement houses, and youth sport leagues. Particularly valuable studies include David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920; and Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920. Less judicious is Cary Goodman's Choosing Sides: Playground and Streetlife in the Lower East Side. David Nasaw, in Children of the City: At Work and At Play, examines related issues. On sport in more formal educational settings, see Thomas Jable, "The Public Schools Athletic League of New York City: Organized Athletics for City School Children, 1903-1914," in Riess's American Sporting Experience, and especially Smith's Sports and Freedom.

Other topics of interest to classes might include the relationship between sport and the media, American participation in the Olympics, and sport as an avenue of social mobility. On the media, see Noll, ed., Government and the Sports Business; Roberts and Olson, Winning is the Only Thing; Joan Chandler, Television and National Sport: The United States and Britain; and Benjamin G. Rader, In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. For an overview of the Olympics, see Allen Guttmann, The Olympic Games, A History of the Modern Games; and on the politics of the Olympics, see Richard Espy, Politics of the Olympic Games. The lives of two of the most prominent American participants are analyzed in Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement and William Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life. For an overview on sport and social mobility, see Riess, "Professional Sports as an Avenue of Social Mobility in America: Some Myths and Realities," in Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology, ed. Donald G. Kyle and Gary D. Stark.

Finally, one of the fastest growing topics in the field is the history of women in sport, although there are at the moment just a few first-rate books on the subject. For a guide to the literature, see Mary Lou Remley's Women in Sport: An Annotated Bibliography and Resource Guide, 1900-1990. A good place to start is Allen Guttmann's Women's Sports: A History, a prize-winning overview of women's sport history from ancient times to the present. A valuable monograph is the aforementioned Verbrugge's Able-Bodied Womanhood which focuses on the rise of well-being among middle-class nineteenth-century female Bostonians, examining athletics at Wellesley, and the establishment of the city's Normal School of Gymnastics. Verbrugge demonstrates women's growing awareness and understanding of health issues. Patricia Vertinsky's The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Exercise and Doctors in the Late Nineteenth Century examines the impact of mainstream physicians on limiting the athletic behavior of Anglo-American women. Quite illuminating is Larry Englemann's The Goddess and the American Girl, a dual biography of tennis stars Helen Wills of the United States and Suzanne Lenglen of France. See also the essays in Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell, eds., A Century of Women's Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four; Reet Howell, ed., Her Story in Sport: A Historical Anthology of Women in Sports, a generally disappointing work; and Stephanie L. Twin, ed., Out of the Bleachers: Writing on Women and Sport. The Journal of Sport History published a special issue on "Sport and Gender" in Spring, 1991. The nine articles focus on both America and Europe, and include essays on gender in early America, old age, physiology and anatomy, Jewish immigrant women, and African-American men and women.

Sport historians have produced a very fine body of scholarship that collectively provides an excellent analytical narrative of the rise of sport, positioning it in a broad historical context, while indicating sport's impact on local and national events. While the task of incorporating sport history into the curriculum will require considerable preparation by the instructor, it will undoubtedly enhance student understanding of the historical process.

Steven A. Riess is Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Sport History and is the author of City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports and Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era.