Baseball and Cultural Heritage

Theinfluence of baseball heritage in society and culture

Baseball’spast has been lauded, romanticized, and idealized, and much has been writtenabout both the sport and its history. This is the first volume to explore theunderstudied side of baseball—how its heritage is understood, interpreted,commodified, and performed for various purposes today.

Theseessays reveal how baseball’s heritage can be a source of great enjoyment andinspiration, tracing its influence on constructed environments, such asstadiums and monuments, and food and popular culture. The contributors discusshow its heritage can be used to address social, political, and economic aimsand agendas and can reveal tensions about whose past is remembered and whose islaid aside. Contributors address race and racism in the sport, representations ofwomen in baseball, ballparks as repositories for baseball’s heritage, and therole of museums in generating the game’s heritage narrative.

Providingperspectives on the social impact and influence of baseball in the UnitedStates, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the UnitedKingdom, Baseball and Cultural Heritageshows how the performance of baseball heritage can reflect the culture andheritage of a nation.

A volumein the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel