The American Dream and the National Game

Table of Contents

Download PDF (18.8 KB)
pp. xi-

Introduction

Download PDF (479.5 KB)
pp. 1-7

WRITING FROM PARIS IN MAY OF 1910, HENRY ADAMS GLOOMILY predicted the end of the usefulness of human intellectual activity. He sought to explain to Barrett Wendell the purpose of his A Letter to American Teachers of History, a volume he had recently sent to fellow members of the American Historical Association....

Chapter I. Johan Huizinga’s World of Work and Play

Download PDF (2.8 MB)
pp. 9-49

LIKE ANY OTHER CONCEPT, PLAY CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN MANY WAYS. The concept that serves to unite the diverse subject matters of my essay is set forth in Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Homo Ludens was published near the end of Huizinga's life, in 1938, and before we consider his theory of the nature of play, it seems best to consider some...

Chapter II. How To Live In It

Download PDF (3.6 MB)
pp. 51-103

IN THE WORK OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE IMPULSE TO UNDERSTAND human activity in terms of work and play is intense and develops through the course of his writings. His work, in general, seems a long search for a setting within which human action might seem meaningful. The most important manifestation of this impulse is Hemingway's frequent use of the sporting world in the settings of...

Chapter III. Professional Sports: The Case of Ring Lardner

Download PDF (1.5 MB)
pp. 105-126

WE MUST NOW GO BACK A FEW YEARS TO LOOK AT THE WRITINGS OF RING Lardner, at once a creative writer and a baseball enthusiast and reporter. His writings will show how one sport, professional baseball, was understood in the years before the first World War. That Lardner largely gave up writing about and reporting sports after...

Chapter IV. Professional Baseball: The Black Sox, Judge Landis, Babe Ruth

Download PDF (5.8 MB)
pp. 127-207

RADICAL CHANGES TOOK PLACE IN PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL BETWEEN September 1919 and June 1922. In its public image during these years, baseball ceased to be a sport explicitly identified with American culture at large, and began, in the values it projected, to be a sport largely associated with anti-democratic values, much like the...

Chapter V. Vince Lombardi’s World

Download PDF (3.5 MB)
pp. 209-256

THIS FINAL CHAPTER WILL FOCUS ON PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL, A SPORT which has passed professional baseball in popularity in the years since World War II and is thought to have established itself as a successor to baseball as America's national game. Baseball is now a sport which represents to many the "good old days," while...

Chapter Notes

Download PDF (1.4 MB)
pp. 257-278

Index

Download PDF (575.1 KB)
pp. 279-285