The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838-72 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS277 If most white Southerners, like Harris, went to war to protect their families, then the war itself undermined their rationale for going. Particularly moving are the passages in the journal written by Emily. The task of running the farm fell squarely on her shoulders. Her travails included sickness, a troublesome overseer, recalcitrant slaves, escaped Yankee prisoners in her gin-house, and the threat of an attack by deserters. "A few more years of this kind of life will wear me out," she wrote in November 1864. "I feel old and miserable and ugly. ... I expect no more rest this side [of] the grave. The wants of the family are never satisfied and their wants weigh heavily on me" (350). She even began doubting her sanity, recalling that one of her mother-in-law's objections to their marriage was insanity in her side of the family. The Piedmont Farmer deals with a whole host of important issues, including the treatment of slaves, the adjustment to Reconstruction, and the impact of taxes on white families before, during, and after the war. Harris did not free his slaves until August 1865. He was subsequently unable to find suitable renters, white or black. For Harris one thing remained constant: the burden of taxation. He ended his journal on March 5, 1870 with: "Taxes has come again & as usual, little or no money" (496). We are indebted to Philip Racine for making these important journals available to us. Edmund L. Drago College of Charleston The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 183872 . By George R. Kirsch. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Pp. 277. $27.50.) A volume in the University of Illinois Press's Sport and Society series, George Kirsch's book makes still another significant contribution to the flourishing subdiscipline of sports history. Over the past fifteen years or so, that area of specialization has produced a rapidly growing number of well-researched, closely argued, thoroughly scholarly studies—some ten of which have appeared in book form under the imprimatur of the University of Illinois Press. Like those and many other recently published works in sports history, Kirsch's study illuminates far more than the history of particular teams and personalities. By examining the longasked but never fully-answered question, "Why baseball for Americans and not cricket?" Kirsch is able to tell us a great deal about the dynamics of American society in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as well as the formative history of the United States' first two organized team sports. 278civil war history As Kirsch's study makes evident, it was by no means inevitable that baseball—originally a boy's game derived from the ancient English game of rounders—would triumph over the established, codified, and traditionladen English sport of cricket. In the two decades preceding the Civil War, in the New York area as well as Philadelphia, Boston, Newark, Jersey City, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and other places, cricket and baseball usually divided the attentions of bat-ball games enthusiasts—both participants and spectators. By the late 1860s, though, baseball's popularity had overwhelmed cricket-playing virtually everywhere. Cricket would undergo a limited revival in the 1870s, particularly in and around Philadelphia, but its appeal would remain restricted to immigrants from the British Isles, the largely Anglophilic eastern upper classes, and, much later, newcomers from parts of the world that had once been British colonies. For the great majority of Americans, cricket simply ceased to matter at all. Meanwhile, baseball became "our game" (as Walt Whitman christened it)—truly the "national pastime" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why all that happened is a complex story, which Kirsch has clarified to a greater extent than any previous scholar. Besides widespread objections to cricket as both an immigrant's game and one associated with the British upper classes, baseball enjoyed the advantage of being new, adaptable, faster paced, yet at the same time easier to play (at least in its early period as a competitive activity for adult males), and more suitable to the work rhythms and time constraints of the young professionals , merchants, and artisans who made...