what baseball has to teach us about city life

I know very little about baseball, but was intrigued to learn that it is a sport that we can look at to learn more about the beginnings of city life in the United States.  In his book City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Gunther Barth tells us that in the 1840s a group of "New York gentlemen" spent their "sunny days" playing ball on one Madison Avenue corner. As ball clubs sprung up in New York, Brooklyn and other cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, the everyday man became fascinated, needing a distraction from work life. The earlier development of newspapers drew more attention to the sport, which is actually a descendant of British ball games, one of them dating back to the 1700s. Spectators welcomed hearing stats. Rules eventually governed this game just as they had governed what happened outside of ballparks.This morning, NPR had a great story about the Birmingham Barons breaking the racial divide in baseball in the early 1960s. It is worth listening to in order to learn more about a sport that became big business although always one about which the public has had some say. Think about what umpires often hear. I don't even want to share what I once heard in the stands at a Cubs game. This semester, students enrolled in this course will learn more about this game as we make discoveries about American culture and the story of the nineteenth century city. Baseball fan and scholar Dr. Richard Megraw of Alabama's American Studies Department will join us September 11 as we explore this topic.