• Prologue Histories of the Game A Note on Method Origins
• Part I: The Culture of Organized Baseball, 1857-1866
• 1. The Base Ball Fraternity Rites of Play "Hard Work and Victory" Players and Workers Cultural Antecedents
• 2. Excitement and Self-control Dangerous Excitement Agents of Control: Rules, Umpires, and Women The Problem of Competition
• 3. The "Manly Pastime" Men and Boys The Fly Rule Ethics of the Game: Reform vs. Custom Fruits of Reform: "Ambitious Rivalries and Selfish Victories"
• Part II: Amateurs into Professionals, 1866-1876
• 4. Growth, Division, and "Disorder" The Coming of the "Good Old Days" Growth and Fragmentation Cultural Conflict and Division
• 5. "Revolving" and Professionalism The Decline of the National Association Baseball Capital and Baseball Labor
• 6. The National Game Home and Away The Birth of the Cincinnati Red Stockings Uniform Identities Management, Triumph, and Defeat: The Red Stockings of
• 1869 and
• 1870
• 7. Amateurs in Rebellion The Amateurist Critique of Professional Baseball "Restoring" the Pastime
• 8. Professional Leagues and the Baseball Workplace "Baseball Is Business Now" The Origins of Baseball Statistics The National League
• Epilogue: Playing for Keeps
• Notes Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue Histories of the Game A Note on Method Origins
• Part I: The Culture of Organized Baseball, 1857-1866
• 1. The Base Ball Fraternity Rites of Play "Hard Work and Victory" Players and Workers Cultural Antecedents
• 2. Excitement and Self-control Dangerous Excitement Agents of Control: Rules, Umpires, and Women The Problem of Competition
• 3. The "Manly Pastime" Men and Boys The Fly Rule Ethics of the Game: Reform vs. Custom Fruits of Reform: "Ambitious Rivalries and Selfish Victories"
• Part II: Amateurs into Professionals, 1866-1876
• 4. Growth, Division, and "Disorder" The Coming of the "Good Old Days" Growth and Fragmentation Cultural Conflict and Division
• 5. "Revolving" and Professionalism The Decline of the National Association Baseball Capital and Baseball Labor
• 6. The National Game Home and Away The Birth of the Cincinnati Red Stockings Uniform Identities Management, Triumph, and Defeat: The Red Stockings of
• 1869 and
• 1870
• 7. Amateurs in Rebellion The Amateurist Critique of Professional Baseball "Restoring" the Pastime
• 8. Professional Leagues and the Baseball Workplace "Baseball Is Business Now" The Origins of Baseball Statistics The National League
• Epilogue: Playing for Keeps
• Notes Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: The English Prize Ring
• 1. Hats in the Ring "The Tremendous Man of Colour" First Blood Professors of Pugilism Ideology and the Ring
• 2. The First American Champions The Rise of "Yankee" Sullivan The Battle of Hastings "The Great $10,000 Match between Sullivan and Hyer"
• 3. The Age of Heroes "The Good Time Coming" The Era of John Morrissey The Fate of Champions
• 4. The Meanings of Prize Fighting Working-Class Culture in Antebellum Cities Meaning in Mayhem The Rites of Violence
• 5. Triumph and Decline "The Great Contest for the Championship of the World" Civil Wars ". . . The Gangs Who Rage and Howl at the Ropes"
• 6. "Fight Like a Gentleman, You Son of a Bitch, If You Can" The Rise of Sports The Strenuous Life Fighting Clerks, Boxing Brahmins, Vigorous Victorians
• 7. The End of the Bare-Knuckle Era "My Name's John L. Sullivan and I Can Lick Any Son-of-a-Bitch Alive" The New Order ". . . Nigh New Orleans upon an Emerald Plain . . ." "The Champion of All Champions"
• Epilogue: The Manly Art Afterword to the Updated Edition
• Notes Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him-Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. P. Morgan'-and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy."-from the Afterword to the Updated Edition Elliott J. Gorn's The Manly Art tells the story of boxing's origins and the sport's place in American culture. When first published in 1986, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other. This updated edition of Gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, gender, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of IllustrationsIntroductionProminent Players and Clubs
• Part 1. The War's Over, 1865-671. Washington DC: A Game to Be Governed2. Richmond: Make It a Southern Game3. Philadelphia: Baseball's Boomtown
• Part 2. Sorting Out New Divisions, 1867-694. Philadelphia: Setting Precedent5. Washington DC: Nationalizing Separation6. Richmond: Calibrating a Response
• Part 3. New Realities Entrenched, the 1870s7. Philadelphia: Permanent Solutions8. Richmond: The Final Tally9. Washington DC: Professional SeparationEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The story of Jackie Robinson valiantly breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947 is one that most Americans know. But less recognized is the fact that some seventy years earlier, following the Civil War, baseball was tenuously biracial and had the potential for a truly open game. How, then, did the game become so firmly segregated that it required a trailblazer like Robinson? The answer, Ryan A. Swanson suggests, has everything to do with the politics of "reconciliation" and a wish to avoid the issues of race that an integrated game necessarily raised. The history of baseball during Reconstruction, as Swanson tells it, is a story of lost opportunities. Thomas Fitzgerald and Octavius Catto (a Philadelphia baseball tandem), for example, were poised to emerge as pioneers of integration in the 1860s. Instead, the desire to create a "national game"-professional and appealing to white Northerners and Southerners alike-trumped any movement toward civil rights. Focusing on Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Richmond-three cities with large African American populations and thriving baseball clubs-Swanson uncovers the origins of baseball's segregation and the mechanics of its implementation. An important piece of sports history, his work also offers a better understanding of Reconstruction, race, and segregation in America.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)