Sports and American Culture – serie

Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling is a history of professional wrestling’s formative period in the U.S., from roughly 1874 to 1941, and the contested interplay of wrestlers and promoters who built the “sport” as we know it. During this period, the major conventions that would define wrestling to the present day were perfected and codified, as wrestling morphed from a rough sport practiced on farms and at town gatherings to melodramatic mass entertainment that reliably drew large crowds in cities across the nation.The narrative uses the life and career of Jack Curley—a boxing promoter whose fortune took a turn for the better when he began promoting wrestling matches--as a compass as it charts the development of wrestling. By the late 1910s, Curley’s shows were selling out Madison Square Garden monthly. Ballyhoo chronicles his competition with the other promoters, as well as the lives of colourful athletes like “Strangler” Ed Lewis, Frank Gotch, the “Masked Marvel,” Jim Londos, “Gorgeous George” Wagner, “Farmer” Martin Burns, and “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg.

For well over a century, big-time college sports has functioned as a business enterprise, one that serves to undermine the mission of institutions of higher education. This book chronicles the long and tortured history of the NCAA’s attempt to maintain the myth of amateurism and the student-athlete, along with the attendant fiction that the players’ academic achievement is the top priority of Division-I athletic programs. It is an indictment of the current system, making the case that big-time college sports cannot continue its connection to universities without undermining the mission of higher education. It concludes with bold proposals to separate big-time college sports from the university, transforming them into on-campus business operations.

For 40 years now, the 1985 World Series between the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals has been largely overlooked, save for the enduring notoriety of umpire Don Denkinger’s infamous missed call in Game 6 that helped galvanize a walk-off Royals victory that forced a Game 7, in which the Royals won in a blowout. Seizing upon the imagery of the famed Interstate Highway 70 that connects Kansas City and St. Louis, Interstate ’85 goes beyond “The Call” and recasts the 1985 Series as a unique and deeply compelling chapter in baseball history.  In this blend of baseball and cultural history, Garvey defines the “I-70 Showdown Series” not only by the literal highway that links the two teams’ home cities but the individual and collective roads travelled by the players and others who took part in the event, both before the Series began and well after the last cheers faded.  In addition to gripping human stories and vivid descriptions of on-field action long overshadowed by Denkinger’s monumental blunder, Garvey’s work captures the provincial spectacle of the “Show-Me Series” throughout the state of Missouri. Featuring 27 new interviews conducted by the author, including with George Brett, Ozzie Smith, Don Denkinger, Bud Black, Andy Van Slyke, Ricky Horton, and Mark Gubicza, Interstate ’85 is baseball history writing at its deepest and most captivating.

2026 Society for American Baseball Research Seymour Medal finalist Baseball’s relationship to American ideals has long been an object of study across disciplines. In Touching Home, Mary Craig contributes to this ongoing study by relating issues of class, race, and gender to America’s theoretical tradition of liberalism and republicanism established during the nation’s founding era. Specifically, Touching Home traces theories of individualism and civic virtue from the founding era through baseball’s place in American society at the end of the twentieth century. The work also examines the mythologizing of baseball’s pastoralism, racial equality, and inculcation of manliness as a civic virtue. These myths became ingrained in baseball in significant ways, including, for example, the Supreme Court’s granting of an antitrust exemption to Major League Baseball; MLB’s promotion of Jackie Robinson’s career as proof of its leadership in and commitment to desegregation; and the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (1943-1954) and subsequent relegation of women to softball. Through the exploration of these and other societal issues, Craig’s work highlights baseball’s development from accessible hobby to multi-billion-dollar corporation, exploring the ways in which the sport has helped shape how individual Americans engage with politics. Indeed, in the pages of Touching Home readers will find a demythologizing of baseball that helps them better understand the results of their efforts to form community through engaging with teams at both the local and national levels. Scholars of American politics, particularly American political thought, will be intrigued to find baseball used as a case study of the effectiveness of the founders’ project of crafting a jointly liberal-republican framework capable of directing Americans toward responsible citizenship. In all of these ways, Touching Home upholds the value of studying popular culture, presenting baseball as a unique and highly interesting lens through which to help us appreciate how individual Americans relate to politics and parties in their respective communities and nationally.