A Companion to American Sport History

By Steven A. Riess

A Companion to American Sport History presents a collection of original essays that represent the first comprehensive analysis of scholarship relating to the growing field of American sport history.

• Presents the first complete analysis of the scholarship relating to the academic history of American sport
• Features contributions from many of the finest scholars working in the field of American sport history
• Includes coverage of the chronology of sports from colonial times to the present day, including major sports such as baseball, football, basketball, boxing, golf, motor racing, tennis, and track and field 
• Addresses the relationship of sports to urbanization, technology, gender, race, social class, and genres such as sports biography

Awarded 2015 Best Anthology from the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118609408

Book preview

Part I

Major Chronological Eras of Sport History

Chapter One

The Emergence of Sport: A Historiographical Appraisal of Sport in America through 1865

James C. Schneider

To study sport in America prior to 1865 is to examine the origins of many popular activities, as well as to uncover many antiquated and now obscure forms of play. More importantly, it is also to explore how American society and culture took shape and the reasons its development unfolded as it did. Without exception, the best modern work by historians who study sport in the colonial, early national, and antebellum eras analyzes the social and cultural meanings of sporting activity in light of some combination of cultural values, social structures, and environmental factors. It is worth noting that from the outset serious historians of sport sought to uncover links between sport and wider society. But the concerns that animated such studies have varied profoundly. A baseball example illustrates the fundamental change in historical approaches from the earliest days. Perhaps the first formal inquiry about an American sport took place around the turn of the twentieth century. Undertaken by Abraham G. Mills, president of the National League, at the behest of Albert Goodwill Spalding – former player, club owner, and by then a sporting goods magnate – it aimed to settle a debate within the baseball community about the origins of the game. Had baseball evolved from the English game of rounders or was it, as Spalding and others insisted, a uniquely American invention? The Mills Commission favored the latter conclusion from the outset and constructed the myth of Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown on the flimsiest of evidence (Seymour 1960). In contrast, modern historians are interested in the Doubleday story, if at all, largely as a cultural construct (Block 2005). The nature of the relationship between rounders and baseball remains of interest to the extent that it helps mark the emergence of modern sports from traditional folk games. Far from attempting to establish or bolster American exceptionalism, as Mills and Spalding were determined to do, scholars today seek to explore such subjects as the relationship between the emergence of baseball and factors like urbanization and industrialization (Adelman 1986; Goldstein 1989; Riess 1989). It is not much of an overstatement to say that serious modern scholarship addresses the meaning of sport at least as much as it concerns itself with the development of a sport on the field or track or in the ring. The study of sport has earned a respected place in the eyes of the historical profession, but for many years the opposite view held sway.

For decades, the academy largely ignored sport as a serious subject of study. One rare exception occurred in 1917, when Frederick L. Paxson examined the rise of sport in an article published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now the Journal of American History), the flagship journal in the field of United States history. Reflecting the immense influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Paxson (1917) characterized the emergence of sport as an artifact of the shift from a rural to an urban society. His view of urban life was anything but benign, and sport represented a needed release from the drudgery of factory work and tensions of crowded urban conditions. Given his analytical approach, it is unsurprising that Paxson had almost nothing to say about the period prior to the Civil War. A decade later John Allen Krout (1929) produced the first serious comprehensive history of sport in America, and in 1940 Krout’s student, Foster Rhea Dulles, published the most influential early history of US sport, America Learns to Play (1965 [1940]). As his title implies, Dulles, like Paxson and Krout, was primarily interested in charting the origins and development of major American sports. Dulles treated his subject seriously and was alert to the suspect nature of the Cooperstown myth. However, he largely focused on the post-Civil War period, other than noting a handful of horse races, boxing matches, and baseball games in the earlier era. His work stood, along with Krout’s, for many years as the only scholarly attempts to survey sport history in the United States. When Harold Seymour proposed baseball as the topic of his doctoral thesis at Cornell in 1956, he had to convince several dubious members of the faculty that the national pastime was a legitimate subject of historical inquiry (Seymour 1960: v). Occasional exceptions, such as in the work of Carl Bridenbaugh (1938, 1955) on colonial cities, were still brief and cursory. Until well past the mid twentieth century, that skeptical attitude toward sport history prevailed within the historical profession.

Shortly before World War II began, however, a seminal work appeared in Europe that was a harbinger of changing attitudes about what history could and should encompass. In 1938 the eminent Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1955 [1938]). As the author of one of the leading studies of medieval Europe, Huizinga had impeccable credentials as a historian. Homo Ludens was a nuanced history of play in Europe, but even more than that it argued for the central importance of play in human society. The book was translated into English and appeared in 1955, at roughly the period when conventions about the proper focus of history were breaking down in a number of areas. A work that has stood the test of time, it remains a key foundation in the study of all forms of leisure.

One final pioneer of sport history in the United States deserves mention. John R. Betts was, like Foster Rhea Dulles, a student of John Krout who continued the Columbia professor’s belief that sport was a topic worthy of serious study. In 1953 Betts published The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sports, 1850–1900, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. As the title indicates, the temporal focus of this article lies mostly outside the scope of the present chapter. Its main concern remains in an important sense traditional – the development of institutional sport. But more than any previous scholar Betts began to move beyond the interpretation of sport as a safety valve to explore afresh the relationship between the forces of modernization in the nineteenth century and the rise of organized play. Betts (1953b) saw the emergence of sport as a benign product of industrialization rather than a marker of its pathology. This article represents an important step in moving the study of sport from the margins to the mainstream, although it was to be another 20 years or so before sport became fully accepted. All the while, Betts (1953a, 1955, 1968) continued to bring out articles in major journals on such topics as changing attitudes within the medical profession about the importance of leisure and exercise to overall health. Tragically, Betts died on the eve of completing his own overview of the history of sport in the United States, which was published as America’s Sporting Heritage, 1850–1950 (1974). Analysis is not its strength – the term encyclopedic is used by almost everyone who comments on the book – but it rests on a prodigious amount of primary research, and served as an inspiration and starting point for many a subsequent project. And, as its title indicates, for Betts the important story began only toward the close of the antebellum era.

In sum, sport in general long remained a marginal subject of study for historians. The small number of works that did appear prior to the mid twentieth century largely focused on the post-Civil War era because the major task was conceived as chronicling major modern sports and sporting institutions. But in the 1960s a pronounced series of shifts – toward social and cultural history, toward history from the bottom up, and the growing use of analytical and conceptual tools from a range of academic disciplines – helped inaugurate a new era in the study of sport and society. As one element in that shift, historians turned with fresh eyes to the years before, including long before, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first overtly professional baseball team, colleges developed modern football, James Naismith nailed a peach basket to a pole, and other similar milestones of American sport history.

Because research has centered predominantly on British America, most examinations of sport in the early colonial period begin with an account of athletic games and leisure pastimes in Britain. ¹ Richard Holt (1988) coined the term festive culture to describe an extensive set of activities ranging from May Day celebrations to parish feasts which featured physical contests and demonstrations of various sorts. Holt focuses on the small agricultural villages that housed the majority of early modern Britain’s population. The culture he describes was attuned to the rhythms and values of traditional farming. Festive culture varied by region and even from village to village, but everywhere it represented an amalgam of folk values and practices, some of which were of pre-Christian origin. The ecclesiastical calendar provided numerous opportunities for relief from work to celebrate the local saint’s day, and seasonal holidays reflected the key stages of the planting and harvesting cycle. Games and contests figured prominently in all these celebrations, with certain physical activities being associated with specific occasions in many regions. Violence often attended these contests. For Holt, festive culture was central to the lives of early modern Britons. It allowed them to display physical prowess, express thanks for crops, court the opposite sex, evade formal strictures about appropriate behavior, and find escape from the harshness and repetition of everyday life (see also Malcolmson 1973; Struna 1996: 11–24).

How then did this festive culture transfer to the New World? The most exhaustive exploration of the transfer of folk culture from Britain to her North American colonies says little about sport directly. David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) devotes about a dozen out of 898 pages of text to attitudes toward sport. But the overall analysis of cultural transfer is instructive and important. Fischer places special emphasis on the importance of locality. On the western side of the Atlantic, scholars have from the outset have stressed regional differences in the formation and development of British North America. Fischer extends this focus back to the homeland, noting the transfer of folkways from specific regions of England and Scotland to specific regions in America. Thus his analysis concurs with Holt’s on the importance of specific localities. It is all the more odd, given his nuanced handling of the influence of region, that in addressing sports folkways Fischer (1989) all but ignores that sine qua non of historical analysis, change over time. He delivers snapshots of sport in colonial America: his accounts are almost static in their inattention to how sport developed over time. This stands in stark contrast to how virtually all other historians have interpreted the subject.

Consider the landmark article by Timothy H. Breen, Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry in Virginia, which appeared in 1977 in the William and Mary Quarterly, over a decade prior to Fischer’s book. Sport in Virginia had already received a lengthy survey by Jane Carson in 1965, but Breen approaches his subject very differently from Carson. Building on the immensely influential work of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), Breen shows how sport or, more accurately, the social behaviors attending athletic contests, can serve as indicators of core cultural values. His focus is specific as to location and time period, namely the Chesapeake region in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but he sees this as a setting in which substantial social changes were underway. By 1700 Virginia was emerging from the serious political, social, and economic unrest that had nearly torn the colony apart in the 1670s and 1680s. Elite planters, most of whom by now were American-born, worked to consolidate their control over colonial institutions in the face of opposition from a series of royal governors who themselves sought to assert their authority more effectively. Virginia was becoming a tri-racial society of white Englishmen, Native Americans, and Africans, as slavery replaced indentured servitude as the main labor force of the tobacco economy with all the fateful implications that resulted. Noting the growth of gambling among the gentry at this time, and the emphasis the gentry put on gambling, Breen posits that betting was a response to changing social conditions that had major symbolic connotations for the Virginia elite and reflected their core values in significant ways. Moreover, because much gambling was done in public, Breen believes that it functioned to promote the status of the gentry in the particular social setting of early eighteenth-century Virginia, relative to commoners, as well as to help them cohere as a social group.

As Geertz had done with Balinese cockfights, Breen interprets horse racing and the gambling that attended it as a social drama. The specific form of racing that emerged as the regional favorite, the quarter mile race, was adopted in part because it served the purposes of social display so well. Virginia, especially the Virginia of the gentry, valued individualism, materialism, and competitiveness. Owning and riding successful horses, and wagering amounts that no ordinary Virginian possessed, let alone could put at risk, defined one as a member of an elite. Furthermore, Breen argues, risk taking did much to help define the very nature of the Chesapeake elite. Gambling reflected the uncertain nature of an uncontrolled tobacco market, and the fact that a planter was willing to risk so much on the outcome of a race expressed his independence and confidence in his own status. Increasingly, races were governed by formally agreed on sets of rules, in order that the outcome would represent a genuine achievement rather than trickery or underhanded tactics. By discussing these and other features of Virginians’ conduct of horse racing, Breen reveals the inner workings of a maturing colonial society. Widely discussed and reprinted, his article set the standard for the next generation of sport scholarship. His theme, that sport and gambling represented key markers of social class, was taken up and adapted by many subsequent scholars (e.g., Adelman 1986; Gorn 1985, 1986; Isaac 1982; Kirsch 1989).

Ironically, Horses and Gentlemen shaped the image of sport in the colonial Chesapeake not unlike the way its eighteenth-century subjects dominated their own era. When one thinks of sport in Virginia, Breen’s planters and their quarter horse races come to mind at once. Elliott Gorn’s (1985) study of rough-and-tumble fighting in the backcountry long represented the one significant, albeit partial, exception to this generalization. While Gorn offers evidence from as early as the mid eighteenth century, his article appears to focus on a later period. The term backcountry embraces a region far beyond the Chesapeake – ranging from Pennsylvania southward to Georgia and extending west from the eastern Appalachian foothills to the Mississippi River Valley. Different too were the folks Gorn studies. He examines the other end of the social and economic continuum from the planter elite, the lower sort (in the parlance of the time), who scratched a subsistence living on the western fringes of European settlement. Their preference for wrestling and fist fighting proved no less revealing of their values than horse racing did for the Tidewater gentry.

Extraordinary violence characterized these matches, for matches they often were. Gorn (1985) uncovers a world in which brutal fighting did not simply result from drunken brawls or impromptu outbursts, but often featured at least rudimentary rules in the sense of a mutually agreed on format between the battlers, witnessed and perhaps subsequently enforced by onlookers. The mayhem might therefore well be structured in at least a rudimentary fashion and the fight went on until one party called it quits or could no longer continue. Physical disfigurement of one’s opponent was not just allowed; it was in many cases the deliberate goal of both combatants. So many participants lost eyes as a result of the deliberate efforts of the other party that the term gouging came into wide use to describe these frontier matches.

Building on the insights of Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1982) with respect to the role of honor in southern society, Gorn (1985) interprets the prevalence of such an ultraviolent form of fighting as a means of expressing aggressive self-assertion and manly pride in the stringent setting of the backcountry (although he is never especially clear where the backcountry begins). Nor is he particularly explicit about demarcating the temporal dimensions of his study, although clearly it extends from the mid eighteenth century into the antebellum era. While Gorn is alert to change over time, region and social structure loom as more essential. Various factors combined to promote this culture of brutality. Social status was unsettled and intensely contested. Economically, many men subsisted largely by their own efforts, with comparatively marginal participation in the developing market economy. Life was physically hard and not infrequently dangerous. So a capacity to endure hardship was essential, and an indifference to suffering could morph into callousness. Many men spent significant time away from their families in the company of their male peers. Few institutions were present to mitigate the violence. But at the heart of Gorn’s analysis is the tension in southern society, and in the backcountry in particular, between hierarchy and equality. Owning slaves conferred the highest status, but most white southerners owned none. They did possess an inherent measure of status, and a sort of equality, precisely because they were white. But no one was willing to let matters end there in a society characterized by individual competition, where failure and ruin were real options. So a value system emerged based on personal honor, in which through violent action men could best express their individual courage, prowess, toughness, and skill – as well as assert their freedom. Placing oneself at risk, Gorn argues, demonstrated a personal autonomy that contrasted starkly with the constraints imposed on slaves. And if the backwoodsman could not match the planters in displays of wealth and freedom from physical labor, gouging allowed him to win at his own game of achieving social status within his immediate community. Gouging was ritualized behavior – a product of specific cultural assumptions as well as social circumstances – socially useful and ethically essential (Gorn 1985: 18–23). Here was the kind of analysis demonstrated by Geertz compellingly applied to the American frontier.

Though lacking Gorn’s depth of explanation, a similar picture can be found in the prize-winning study of the Old Dominion, Rhys Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), published three years prior to the appearance of Gouge and Bite (Gorn 1985). Isaac utilizes Breen’s work as part of an overall exploration of social stress and cultural clashes in Virginia during the mid and late eighteenth century. Isaac’s Virginia was built on hierarchy but was vexed by notions of equality (among whites of course.) Religious upheaval fueled this conflict. Economic volatility made success – and consequently status – problematic, and accordingly they were valued all the more. Circumstances provided for extensive interaction between the different social strata, an element that figures more prominently in Isaac’s analysis than in either Breen’s or Gorn’s. Self-assertion and demonstrations of prowess were central to establishing a man’s standing in society. In such a culture, physical contests had taken on a central role in providing the occasion for self-display. Whether as a participant in a gouging contest, as an owner of a champion horse or fighting cock, as a gambler, or in some other role, sport allowed men to be men. There were other ways to demonstrate masculinity of course, as Isaac discussed, but sport loomed large as a signifier at all levels of society. Alert to the presence of paradox, Isaac notes that sport could flout social conventions (cockfights were rare occasions in which slaves might be found rooting alongside their masters, with women present in the crowd as well) while simultaneously delineating them.

If Breen, Gorn, and Isaac extended the study of sport in the upper South back in time from the previous focus on the mid nineteenth century, the early colonial period remained understudied until Nancy Struna published People of Prowess in 1996. For almost two decades after Horses and Gentlemen (Breen 1977) appeared, our understanding of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake remained where Jane Carson had left it. In no small part, this is understandable. It stems from the nature of Chesapeake society in that era. The region’s English settlers, in what was aptly termed a tobacco culture, were obsessed with growing the money crop whose potential it had taken them a while to grasp, but which yielded such rich returns in the 1620s and 1630s. Two other features of the early seventeenth-century Chesapeake also militated against the development of much sporting culture. Many of those who came over did so as indentured servants and were often ruthlessly exploited by their employers, leaving them little time or energy for active leisure. Worse yet, the death rate in the early Chesapeake was appalling. On the other hand, it was an overwhelmingly male society in those years, and as Gorn and others have noted, male subcultures are prone to engaging in games and physical contests of various sorts. Yet even a society obsessed with growing tobacco, reaping profits, and (perhaps) returning to England could not work all the time.

It comes as no real surprise that Struna (1996) confirms what most historians had already suspected. Evidence of sporting activity is minimal for Virginia or Maryland in the initial decades of settlement. Virginia’s House of Burgesses tried to outlaw gambling on dice and card games, an indication that gambling on those activities was practiced, but there was no mention of ball games, cockfighting, or any of the other contests that might well have gone on. Struna notes one other, often overlooked, factor that likely inhibited sporting activity among the newcomers – climate. The Tidewater Chesapeake was much warmer than the English homeland of those early immigrants, so that working in such heat and humidity must have been exhausting for the settlers. Then, too, the newcomers brought few goods with them and favored those necessary items that would help them survive and succeed in the New World. We know they drank alcohol, often to excess when the supply and the rhythms of tobacco cultivation allowed it, but they seem not to have played very much. Struna’s summary conclusion, that [p]opular English recreations were, at most, irregular practices in the Chesapeake from the late 1620s onward, and neither planters nor servants had a vested interest in making them otherwise, seems right (1996: 52–57).

What of sport in the other locus of early seventeenth-century English settlement, New England? Our understanding of sport in colonial New England became far more sophisticated in the mid-1990s. Not only did Struna devote much attention to it, but a year prior to People of Prowess (1996), another work examined the subject in light of the Puritans’ overall attitudes toward recreation. In Puritans at Play (1995), Bruce C. Daniels reclaims Puritanism from the lingering spell of Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. L. Mencken. The Puritans were not, according to Horton Davies, the dull, solemn, melancholy, misanthropes of popular perception (cited on the back cover of Daniels 1996). If few historians who studied colonial New England would accept any such simplistic stereotype, both Daniels’s and Struna’s accounts address in an informed and nuanced a fashion the then still prevailing view that Puritanism was so inherently hostile to sport that the two were nearly irreconcilable. There are compelling reasons why such a view held sway for as long as it did.

The commonplace starting point for almost any history of sport in America is the decree usually known as the Book of Sports, issued by James I of England and Ireland (James VI of Scotland) in 1618. Puritans were trying to suppress traditional Sunday amusements in certain parts of the realm, and James sought to protect traditional festive culture, or substantial elements of it, from the Puritan insistence that the Sabbath be given over exclusively to the Lord and to rest. The other episode with which histories of sport in America often open also involves an effort by committed Protestants to prevent others from enjoying a game. On Christmas Day 1621, William Bradford grudgingly excused some non-Pilgrims from having to work in the fields out of respect for their supposed observance of the Savior’s birthday (the observance of which most Puritans rejected for a number of religious reasons). He returned to find them playing stool-ball and other games. Seizing their implements, he ordered them to stay in their homes. So our beliefs about Puritan antipathy to sport, indeed to most forms of recreation and amusement, seem well founded (Solberg 1977).

This view is one that Struna largely endorses, although she gives it a distinct underpinning. The traditional view of Puritans saw them as religious zealots, undertaking (in a phrase Perry Miller made famous) an errand into the wilderness in order to establish the New Jerusalem in New England and ultimately to redeem the world by the light of their example of a society properly obedient to God’s will. Struna is too careful a scholar to accept the idea that any form of leisure activity was anathema to the Puritans. They did not transplant England’s festive culture to Massachusetts Bay and other outposts, but even John Winthrop acknowledged that he felt a compelling need for outward recreation. At first, like their compatriots in the Chesapeake, they were so consumed by the work necessary simply to establish a viable settlement that they were unable to afford much time for leisure. And certainly they accepted a strict view of what could be done on the Sabbath. Because none of the upper rank of English society, whose patronage protected festive culture in the homeland, crossed the Atlantic, festive culture lacked any powerful patronage among the builders of the Bay Colony and its offshoots. But Struna argues that a particular ideology instructed the Puritans’ view of leisure and leisure activities. As she sees it, the key component to that ideology was a commitment to the ideological primacy of labor and to the broader Protestant reformist tradition linking labor and leisure (Struna 1996: 21). In other words, it was not so much that the Puritans disapproved of leisure activities per se; the root problem was that leisure took time away from work. This emphasis on the importance of work seems excessively reductionist, as Daniels reveals.

For Daniels (1995), Puritan attitudes toward recreation were essentially ambivalent, as revealed by the concept of sober mirth. He extends and largely supersedes the important earlier work of the German scholar Hans-Peter Wagner, whose work is most easily available in English in Puritan Attitudes towards Physical Recreation in 17th Century New England (1976). Although it argues that Puritans evaluated the worthiness of a specific sport on the basis of history and experience, Wagner’s account provides considerable support for the proposition that Puritan attitudes about the role of leisure in general were derived from their broader theology. Leisure was necessary and beneficial because it was restorative. But games, contests, and similar activities, as commonly undertaken by English festive culture, presented a threefold danger in Puritan eyes. Recreations engaged in on the Sabbath or a holy day were considered misspent time. Those days should be spent in attending to one’s relationship with God. Second, games and contests easily led to more sinful activity, such as drunkenness or gambling. But the third problem with many recreations resulted from the powerful allure they had for many people. Participants and observers not infrequently became intensely involved in contests and gave themselves over to such events. Games and matches were much anticipated. People put aside other activities in order to take part in them. In short, people placed great value on recreations, far too much from the Puritan perspective. Sport thus could, and did, become a false god, which to a Puritan meant an instrument of the devil to lead the unwary down the path to perdition. So the task for Puritans was to find ways to rest and restore their bodies and minds without succumbing to the temptations inherent in many such activities. Sport and leisure represented yet another manifestation of what Edmund Morgan in 1958 termed the Puritan dilemma, that is, how to live in the world and not for the world. They attempted to resolve this dilemma, albeit without much success in Daniels’s estimation, through the idea of sober mirth. The term was employed in 1707 by the Rev. Benjamin Colman in a lengthy pamphlet with the thoroughly Puritan title of The Government and Improvement of Mirth, According to the Laws of Christianity, in Three Sermons. Colman’s concept is closer to our modern idea of leisure than to our understanding of sport, in that the purpose was to provide rest and restoration, while the means was to be wholesome and to avoid taxing either mind or body unduly. Fishing met all these criteria and was the most acceptable form of sport in seventeenth-century New England. However, Daniels argues that Puritans never articulated a clear and compelling ethic about leisure. No wonder then that they also failed to agree on what was acceptable practice and what was not (Daniels 1995: xii–xiii, 16–19).

Daniels and Struna agree broadly on how sport evolved in colonial New England. Our best evidence indicates that certain forms of sport found in English festive culture, such as animal blood sports, remained all but absent among the American Puritans. Rhode Island was always the most tolerant colony toward sport, as in other ways. The range of sporting activity broadened as the eighteenth century unfolded, although Daniels puts more weight than Struna on the continuing power of traditional attitudes to inhibit activity up through the coming of the American Revolution. Even so, religious fervor waned (the Great Awakening does not much figure in his account) and the strictures of the founding generation held less sway over subsequent generations. A burgeoning population, spreading out over a wider area, meant that age, social class, gender, and location shaped opportunities for recreation. As colonial New England became less homogeneous, variation in social behavior, including recreations, increased. Above all, the distinction between urban and rural life grew more pronounced. By the 1720s, organized horse racing was sufficiently acceptable that races could be advertised in Boston newspapers. But when Daniels (1995) develops the implications of these social changes for the study of leisure, his examples were drawn from realms other than sport. However, Puritans at Play is a book about leisure, so the paucity of sports examples should not be read as a denial that sport played a significant role in the changing culture of New England.

Struna (1996) explores the world of eighteenth-century sport far more extensively and systematically than any other historian. People of Prowess synthesizes scholarship on colonial sport and recreation, and extends it by incorporating the work of Breen, Isaacs, Fischer, and others into an analytical framework of its own. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Struna argues, the middle and upper ranks of (Anglo-)American society had accomplished the construction of a distinctive sphere of leisure and the assignment of some sports to it (1996: 166). This distinction, she clearly believes, was crucially important in the history of sport, but also to the wider development of American society in its modern form. Much more than Daniels, Struna posits that sport was central to this emerging sphere of leisure. She and Daniels agree that the careful conceptual distinctions between sports on the one hand, and games, contests, and athletic displays on the other, are more or less moot points with respect to the premodern era they study. In the colonial period, the more useful and appropriate terms are play and leisure. For Struna what matters are displays of physical prowess, especially in some sort of competitive setting. As these became more structured, that is, as they became sports in the more modern sense of formalized physical contests (distinguishing particular performances in time, place, and mode of behavior and assigning to them distinctive expectations and values), they helped delineate the boundaries between work and leisure. This distinction, in turn, was the critical and even dominant element in constructing the lifestyles characteristic of middle- and upper-class men. The gendered basis of this activity served to bolster the growing separation of the lives of middle- and upper-class women and men into distinct spheres of activity. Struna describes this new sporting ethic as the genteel sporting style. It was characterized by defined places and times for sports events, rule making on a more elaborate scale than before the Revolution, greater use of specialized equipment, and the emergence of distinctive expectations and codes of behavior. Acceptance of these developments occurred unevenly, and not simply with respect to social class. Change was much more pronounced in cities than in rural areas, an observation she shares with Daniels. In cities at least, she argues, the basis for modern sport had been laid no later than the 1820s (Struna 1996: 2–5, 9, 188–189, 196–197).

Struna does not make much of the regional implications of her conclusions. Since the northern and eastern portions of the country urbanized much more rapidly than the South, regional differences increased along with distinctions rooted in class and gender. Region, of course, figures centrally in the study of colonial America, but the historiography of colonial sport and leisure disproportionally reflects the long-standing tendency in colonial studies to focus on the Chesapeake (and, really, Virginia) and New England (and, really, Massachusetts Bay). But Jack Greene has argued persuasively that the Middle Colonies prefigured subsequent developments in American history better than Massachusetts or even Virginia. With the isolated exception, notably, of J. Thomas Jable’s articles (1973, 1974) on Quaker efforts to suppress festive culture in Pennsylvania, sport and leisure in the Middle Colonies remain significantly understudied.

Struna does note, somewhat defensively, that hers is a study of Anglo-American sport, an approach she justifies on pragmatic grounds. This points to a second limitation in the existing scholarship on colonial sport, its narrow ethnic focus. To a degree this is an overlap from the previously mentioned gravitational pull of Virginia and Massachusetts. The largest group of non-English whites, the Scots Irish, migrated to the southern backcountry and, as we have seen, are discussed by Gorn and Fischer. But most Germans settled in Pennsylvania, and their story remains largely untold. New York housed a diverse population, and has yet to be thoroughly studied.

But the most serious gap in our knowledge concerns the nonwhite population. Blacks appear fitfully in discussions of sport in the Chesapeake, but have not been systematically studied for any period in which the majority were enslaved. Ira Berlin (1998, 2003), the leading authority on American slavery, barely mentions games and contests involving the enslaved in his recent history of the peculiar institution. Coverage is almost as sparse in the handful of other works that touch on leisure activities enjoyed by blacks at any point before slavery ended. Equally absent from the historiography are Native Americans. Colonial historians now agree that Native Americans are essential to any sophisticated understanding of colonial America. Their stories deserve telling on their own merits, but in addition James Axtell (1992) has conducted a counterfactual analysis to show that if North America had lacked human habitation in 1492 the subsequent history of European settlement would have to be rewritten root and branch. Given our present understanding of the miniscule extent to which the English absorbed Indian sporting practices, it would appear that this overall generalization does not hold for sport history. That is, we have good reason to think the trajectory along which sport developed in the British colonies would not have been basically altered had there been no indigenous population. But the very lack of borrowing is itself revealing of English cultural arrogance. The contrast with Canada is stark. There the French pursued much more extensive cultural interaction with Indians. Small wonder that lacrosse, a Native American game, has figured much more prominently in the sports pantheon north of the forty-ninth parallel than it does to the south.

Leaving aside the question of Native American influence, or the lack thereof, on the development of sport among the colonists, the role of sport among Indian peoples deserves telling for its own sake. There is not much work on this subject and what little there is has been done by anthropologists. It is hard to think of another area of scholarship in which a work published in 1907 would still be cited as anything more than a historiographical artifact. Yet Stewart Culin’s Games of the North American Indians (1992 [1907]) is still the standard source on its subject. Charles Hudson (1992) addresses the role of games in his study of the southeastern tribes, but his is one of only two modern works to examine the role of games and sports in Native American societies. Kendall Blanchard (1981) explores the role of sport among the Choctaw in what is by far the best analysis we have of any sport in any Indian society. This work is now three decades old, and has yet to be replicated for any other Native American culture.

The situation is if anything less complete with respect to Spanish America. The standard history of the Spanish borderlands, David J. Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992), is an excellent, richly analytical, overview of its subject. Yet there is only one brief mention of sporting activity, a horse race in San Antonio in 1778, and Weber’s purpose is to comment on the poor quality of the streets. As it happens, San Antonio is the setting for the only sustained examination of leisure on the borderlands. Jesus F. De la Teja (2009) finds that local officials were hostile to many leisure activities because they promoted gambling and other socially disruptive behavior, an attitude the Puritan fathers shared. But Spanish authorities attacked card playing and dancing far more than athletics in their reports to their Mexican superiors. This is an interesting glimpse into the subject, but far more work needs to be done on sport along Spain’s northern frontier. De la Teja’s research was preceded by Jodella Dyreson’s (1997) path-breaking study of sporting activity at the end of the colonial era in Texas, a work notable not least for its inclusion of women’s activities, such as quilting contests and sewing bees, as appropriate subjects of study.

We also need to know more about developments in the early national period. Struna (1996) notes that Republican ideology attacked what it saw as the corruptive effects of an excessive preoccupation with luxury goods. A target of this sort of criticism was the genteel sporting style (Struna 1996: 120–128) then in its infancy. This subject needs a more thorough examination. If the Revolution retarded the emergence of a sporting culture, was this a result primarily of ideology? Severe economic disruption and hardship followed the Peace of Paris as the new United States struggled to re-establish its international trade outside the confines of the British imperial system. Recovery accompanied the onset of war in Europe in the 1790s. Did this affect the re-emergence of sport and, if so, in what fashion? Struna emphasizes the role of taverns as sites of sporting activity in the late colonial era. As foreign trade became disrupted owing to respective British and French efforts to prevent American goods from reaching their opponents, domestic travel increased and large numbers of seamen were thrown out of work. Each of these developments would seem to boost patronage in taverns (Struna 1996: 148–161). Was sporting culture thus nurtured? We simply need to know more about this period.

An additional factor that would seem to be woven into the fabric of the emergence of American sport is nationalism. Among the many virtues of Elliott Gorn’s The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (1986) is the light it sheds the role of nationalism, a subject not itself the major focus of the work by any means. The book opens with what in later years would have been termed a championship fight. Tom Cribb was English; his opponent Tom Molineaux was an American, of African descent no less. The bout took place outside London, but what is noteworthy is the date, September 1811. Relations between the United States and Great Britain had reached a critical stage, with war only months away. In the eyes of the boxing community, Cribb literally fought for England and his victory was taken as evidence for the continued superiority of English virility. Yet what also strikes us about the episode, and what Gorn reveals about the emergence of prizefighting in the United States, is the continuing influence of Great Britain on her former colonies and recent antagonist. Viewed through a cultural lens, Americans, it seems, adopted much more than the formal rules of boxing from their cousins across the Atlantic (Gorn 1986: 19–22, 38–45, 63).

As much as any single book of its time, The Manly Art (Gorn 1986) demonstrated the potential for sport history to yield major and previously unexpected insights into major historical issues. As far back as Paxson, historians had pondered the links between the emergence of sport and the changing economic and social order of nineteenth-century America. Gorn addresses this relationship through the cultural prisms of class and gender, in a subtle and multifaceted argument that takes readers deeply into the world of workers struggling to forge identities in cities where the very nature of work was being transformed. Boxing was grounded in urban working-class neighborhoods, often with distinct ethnic identities. Many early fighters had in fact been born in the British Isles. But the social and cultural milieu of American cities in the decades after 1820 brought boxing to maturity at the same time as it marginalized the sport as unwholesome and dangerous. The changing nature of work was central to this process. Increasingly, workers were compelled to surrender their autonomy and sense of personal accomplishment, associated with the old system of artisanal production, to the strictures of the emerging factory system. Gorn argues that while boxing in some respects exemplified certain core values – individualism, materialism, and a desire for success – that had been associated with capitalism, it also flouted others, including aspects of Victorian morality. Above all, the Victorians preached self-restraint and deferred gratification. Boxing culture celebrated neither. But Gorn sees that it offered a way for men to be men, even if only vicariously through the exploits of local pugilists. Matches were dramas of physical courage and prowess, with clear outcomes and rewards (or penalties) for those who backed the prizefighters with bets. Here was a means to compensate for the cultural rewards work often could no longer supply. Here was a way to assert one’s independence from the boss. Pugilism also demonstrated what these men had seen all around as they grew up – a brutal world in which suffering and defeat were commonplace. Victorian bromides that hard work and thrift provided a sure route to comfort and prosperity were too complacent by half. The violent world of the ring mirrored the violent world in which urban workers lived, but with more honor imbedded in pugilism than many men saw at the workplace. Condemnations of the manly art by middle-class moralists rang hollow in the ears of working-class men, who knew how boxing both reflected and transcended the world they experienced (Gorn 1986: 129–146).

The Manly Art also reflects its author’s obvious ambivalence toward the sport he examines. Much as Gorn sympathizes with the plight of his working-class subjects, and interested as he plainly is in the exploits of the bare-knuckle fighters, he is forthright about the pathologies involved. These extended beyond the obvious mayhem in the ring to the effects of boxing on definitions of masculinity. Physical courage, the ability to inflict and withstand pain, the embracing of gambling and drinking as markers of social status – these were all elements representing virility in the world of the antebellum worker. On the other hand, such attitudes promoted social distance between men and women, encouraged exploitation of the latter, and, worse yet, sanctioned violence as a permissible male prerogative. At its extreme, boxing killed men outright on occasion. Less dramatically but more commonly, the sport inflicted long-term physical and psychological damage on its participants (Gorn 1986: 146–147).

Others have followed Gorn in viewing sport as an arena in which different social groups contested one another in an effort to assert their own values and define appropriate social behaviors for themselves and others. Notably, Scott Martin (1995) examined southwestern Pennsylvania in the first half of the nineteenth century, where an emerging mining economy and a budding manufacturing sector transformed a region which had been an agricultural backwater. Harvey Green’s Fit for America (1986) is only partly about sport, but Green stresses the cultural underpinnings of the drive by middle-class reformers to promote physical well-being as they defined it.

Health reformers tended to blame American cities for many of the evils they sought to ameliorate. For quite different reasons, historians of American sport have also focused their attention on urban centers as they sought to explain the rise of modern sport in the United States. The concept of modernization was central to the analysis in a number of major studies of the emergence of modern sport in the mid nineteenth century. The single most influential expression of modernization theory, insofar as the historiography of early American sport is concerned, was by Richard Brown (1976). Also important was the use of modernization theory by Allen Guttmann in his seminal early global overview of the development of sport, From Ritual to Record (2004 [1978]). In various ways, the concept of modernization informed a series of important works that dealt at least in part with sport in antebellum American cities. Beginning with Dale A. Somers’s (1972) study of New Orleans, and followed a decade later by Stephen Hardy’s sophisticated examination of How Boston Played (1982), a series of works by historians trained in urban history analyzed the shift from folk games and contests to dawn of professional sport in the late antebellum era. This approach – to call this group a school is to imply too a great a conceptual uniformity – culminated (to date) in landmark books by Melvin Adelman (1986) and Steven A. Riess (1989). A decade later, Gerald Gems studied Chicago through a similar lens in Windy City Wars (1997). To paraphrase the celebrated aphorism of Jacques Barzun about baseball and America – in the eyes of these historians at least – to understand the rise of sport one had better know urban history.

While it appeared more than a quarter century ago, Melvin Adelman’s examination of the rise of modern sport in New York City, A Sporting Time (1986), remains the most thorough examination we have of the emergence of modern athletics in period prior to the Civil War. Up until that point, historians had pretty much agreed that modern sport was a late nineteenth-century development. Stephen Hardy’s fine study, How Boston Played (1982), which appeared only four years before Adelman’s book, begins with 1865. Hardy states the prevailing view about the chronology of modern American sport quite succinctly, that while there was much interest and organization in sport and recreation before the Civil War, the real surge came after Appomattox (1982: xii). Tellingly, he devotes very little space to the earlier period and sees the most important development as the conviction among antebellum reformers about the need to find ways to ameliorate or counteract the evils they saw in the lives of the urban working class. In Boston at least, their efforts yielded scant results until after the Civil War (Hardy 1982: 43–53, 129–132).

Adelman (1986: 1–3) does not deny the centrality of the late nineteenth century as a watershed in the development of modern sport, but he does contend that the prewar period was more significant than previous historians have realized. Hardy takes 1865 as his starting point; Adelman ends his account only five years later. He examines the gamut of organized athletic activity in New York City, covering everything from yachting to animal blood sports. He dwells especially on what he terms sports of the turf – trotting and thoroughbred racing – and on ball games – baseball and cricket. He seeks to uncover levels of activity, but also the extent to which both competitive and recreational sport had already become organized by 1870. By each measure, sport had developed much more extensively than previous historians had acknowledged.

In making his case, Adelman relies on modernization theory more explicitly than perhaps any other historian of sport considered in this chapter. He employs modernization theory to make the concepts of urbanization and industrialization less abstract than in previous usages, and in particular to appreciate their impact on human behavior, specifically in the realm of sport. Adelman also seeks to supplement discussion of the societal factors that gave rise to modern sport by placing greater emphasis than had hitherto been done on the institutional character and internal structure of sport as explanatory factors in their growth. He offers six key markers to differentiate premodern from modern sport: organization, the degree of formality to governing rules, the geographic scope of competition, role differentiation among participants and between participants and spectators, the nature of the information available to the public concerning a sport, and the records and statistics maintained about a particular activity. Of special importance in the overall process of modernization, by Adelman’s reckoning, was the role of voluntary associations, the heart and soul of the organized sports movement. These arose as a result of a variety of demographic, social, and ideological factors, and not simply as a result of the physical growth of cities. The most crucial product of this mixture was the emergence of an ideology of modern sport, which valued athletics on utilitarian terms as a means to promote good health and good character, and as a moral buttress against the problems of living in the modern city (Adelman 1986: 1–3).

A Sporting Time examines the panoply of sports activities in New York City through the prism of this sophisticated analytical framework. The result is the most comprehensive, supple, and nuanced account we have of the emergence of modern athletics in antebellum America. Along with Nancy Struna, Adelman is one of the relatively few historians writing on sport in the premodern era to employ quantitative analysis. He balances the particularities of individual entrepreneurship and fickle public taste with the underlying forces of population growth, accompanying spatial expansion, roller coaster economic development, technological advances in communication and transportation, and changing ideology. Adelman’s approach is well illustrated by his analysis of harness racing. He employs his modernization framework to argue convincingly that, judged by the key markers of modernity – formal organization, written rules, wide public interest promoted by the press, record keeping, and the rest – harness racing had developed further than any other sporting activity in antebellum America. Like other forms of sport, in other settings, it served to mark social status, although somewhat uniquely trotting began as a sport in which the newly wealthy could compete with their more established social superiors. The latter, in turn sought ways to establish exclusivity (Adelman 1986: 55–89.) All in all, A Sporting Time set a high standard for all subsequent sport history.

Probably the most emphatic case for the centrality of cities to the emergence of modern sport has been made by Steven Riess. The aptly titled City Games (1989) follows his important earlier work on sport in the Progressive era, which had made a similar case and which had been published three years after Adelman’s landmark analysis. Where previous historians like John Betts had seen cities as sites in which modern sport took shape, and had tended to give more weight to industrialization rather than urbanization as a causal factor in the rise of sport, for Riess the evolution of the city was of unrivaled importance: American sport history is largely the product of the constant, continuous interaction of the elements of urbanization – physical structure, social organizations, and value systems – with each other and with sport. The city represented an organic environment whose changing components at once shaped and were shaped by emerging sports. Well aware that the majority of Americans lived in rural areas through the Civil War (and beyond), Riess argues that it was the process of urbanization (the massive growth of cities in size, attendant complexity, and the multiplicity of their institutions) that served as the engine of change, that made sport modern (1989: 1–2).

Most of City Games deals with the period after the scope of this chapter, but Riess nonetheless gives the period up through the Civil War considerable attention. This was the era of the walking city, that is, a city sufficiently compact that walking could constitute the principle means of personal transportation, while animal-drawn wagons served to carry goods. Such communities had comparatively little specialized space; commerce and manufacturing were not usually conducted in areas distinct from where people lived. After 1820 both international and domestic trade began to rise rapidly and cities functioned as nexus in this expansion. As a result, urban populations increased far more rapidly than the prodigious national norm, transforming cities in myriad ways. The implications for sport were profound. Riess points to the enlarged pool of potential spectators and participants in urban centers, the continuing availability of space in which to conduct sporting events, a growing perception that urban conditions were becoming unhealthy and unwholesome, and (most crucially) a resulting ideology that valued sport as an antidote to these emerging problems. The new pro-sports creed, Riess argues, helped the middle class reverse its traditional suspicions about the value of recreation. They joined an urban elite which was already embracing sport as a means to delineate its own elite status. At the other end of the social continuum, an influx of immigrants established ethnic sports communities as a way of preserving their cultural heritage in an unsettling and not infrequently hostile environment. Thus the proliferation of sport and sports institutions in the late nineteenth century had important roots in the antebellum era.

Riess finds that certain tensions existed in all phases of urban growth and that they shaped the development of sport. First among these was the dynamic relationship between population change and urban spatial arrangements. Walking cities were dotted with undeveloped areas and modestly trafficked streets that served as sites for the minimally organized and noncommercial sports of the premodern era. Relatively small populations, comparatively low levels of pollution in rivers (every significant city was located on a body of water of one sort or another), and ready access to the countryside all allowed dwellers of the walking city to continue the field and water sports so popular in colonial times. A second tension was ideological, as antebellum reformers launched what proved to be an ongoing effort to promote sport as an antidote to various social ills, many of which they associated with urban life. This new value put on the benefits of sport clashed with traditional views that stressed the dangers of idleness and self-indulgence. Finally, as city populations became more ethnically diverse, there was an ongoing clash between the forces pushing Americanization, who saw sport as a means to that end, and those ethnics who wished to preserve their own heritage in all sorts of ways, including how they played and exercised. Finally, Riess contends that these tensions were present throughout the United States, although they varied in the degree of their development according to how much an individual city had undergone modernization. Organized sports, he finds, were structured in a similar fashion regardless of the size of the particular city, and served essentially the same functions everywhere (Riess 1989: 6–8).

Much the greater portion of City Games deals with the period after 1865, but Riess concurs with Adelman in seeing developments in pre-Civil War cities as representing considerably more than a simple backdrop to the more crucial late nineteenth century. Riess focuses almost exclusively on New York City in his discussion of the walking city at a time when it was in the process of outpacing its colonial rivals to become the largest and most prosperous city in America. He argues that the processes evident in Gotham were replicated elsewhere eventually. During the Jacksonian and antebellum eras, explosive population growth and the generation of wealth on a scale unprecedented in American history fostered the emergence of several distinctive sporting cultures that catered to the needs and interests of social elites, ethnic groups, the male bachelor subculture, and the bourgeoisie (Riess 1989: 46). Alongside the seedy (to middle-class and elite eyes) world of the taverns and billiard parlors, where boxing and even less reputable sports were thriving, the middle and upper classes were developing their own associations, including many involving sport.

City Games offers a supple and multifaceted explanation of how urbanization led to the modernization of sport. Growing wealth, especially in the discretionary income of the middle and upper classes, combined with the time for leisure available to them, afforded the means for sport that the new pro-sport ideology endorsed. Improvements in transportation technology enabled them to reach sporting sites more easily, just as improved communications heightened awareness of sporting activity. Expanding populations, notably of immigrant communities, furnished a critical mass of people to support various sports through voluntary associations. Examples of sport among European elites inspired emulation among their American counterparts. Entrepreneurs built facilities, sponsored events, and boosted awareness, although the business of sport in those years was fraught with risk. Yet growth was a double-edged sword, curtailing or crippling some sports as the competition for space diminished those open areas that had been the scene of much premodern activity, imposed higher operating costs on track owners and others, and made access to the countryside more difficult for those unable to afford the new means of transportation. The poor were thus thrown back on the very sites and sports their betters so deplored. Throughout the era, city governments had little impact as yet, according to Reiss, being unwilling to add to public space for sport or any other purpose (1989: 47).

Of all the sports examined by Adelman, Riess, and others, none claimed a stronger hold on the American public than baseball. Even before the Civil War, its adherents were invoking the term the national game to proclaim its special status. The literature on the emergence of baseball is immense. Adelman makes it a major focus of his modernization analysis and Riess interweaves it through his discussion of urban transformation, although much more thoroughly after the Civil War than before. Benjamin Rader (2008) has written what is probably the standard single-volume history of the game, although Warren Goldstein’s Playing for Keeps (1989) should also be consulted, and Seymour’s (1960) pioneering work continues to yield its rewards. Of particular interest is the exploration by George Kirsch (1989) of why baseball triumphed over cricket in the 1850s.

Across the United States only horse racing could approach baseball in popularity. Indeed in its ability to draw crowds for major races, nothing surpassed the turf in the antebellum era. Once again Adelman (1986) addresses the subject in the context of modernization, while Nancy Struna (1981) emphasizes regional rivalries in a typically impressive work of analysis.

The subject of sport during the Civil War has received less attention than it deserves. There is general agreement that the popular acceptance of baseball itself and in particular the New York game, that is the version that emerged in and around New York City in the late antebellum years, was accelerated by its widespread embrace by soldiers during the war. In A Sporting Time, Adelman (1986) discusses the very mixed fortunes of sport during the war years in New York City. That story