"the game almost reduced their daily tensions"

 Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

As Americans learned how to make time for work and play, baseball became a popular sport. But how do we make connections between it and the growth of cities? The students in this course will learn as much next fall. 

Indeed, by the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks.  In this course, we will learn how city dwellers found opportunities to enjoy themselves through baseball which was just one of many spectator sports drawing crowds in and outside the urban space. Cricket and horse racing  were among the most popular until many turned to baseball and football in the second half of the nineteenth century. Like football, baseball eventually became big business.

One of three course readings

But whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated in the United States, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades. Moreover, for decades this sport, like many, was segregated, oppressing certain players even more.

We will learn how baseball figures into the needs of urban people who, as Gunther Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."