On Saturday, the students and I will travel with Dr. Richard Megraw of UA's American Studies Department to Birmingham's Rickwood Field. They should be prepared to think deeply about how Birmingham serves as a case study for analyzing baseball's role in emerging urban life.
When and where do we see Americans entering ballparks?
Yes, how does
watching a baseball game help us find meaning in a changing world on and off the field during the nineteenth century?
For historian Gunther Barth, baseball figures into emerging city culture between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.
Is baseball just an athletic contest or does it have other lessons to teach us about competition in a modern world?
How do referees seem to take the place of public officials and priests?
And since people have been playing ball since antiquity, what's significant about what's happening by the middle of the nineteenth century?
Is the Roman emperor really the same as baseball entrepreneurs? How does the story of baseball in Birmingham compare to baseball's emergence in, say, New York, St. Louis or Pittsburgh?
With all of things we've learned to date, among them topics addressing gender, race and ethnicity, I hope the students come prepared to ask and offer answers to these and other questions.
Meanwhile, check out an interview with Dr. Megraw here.
The often uncivil comments on social media, news and other websites make many wonder, "When did people become so rude?" Gunther Barth tells us it is actually the other way around, particularly in an emerging urban America. For him, nineteenth century city-dwellers in the United States underwent a "civilizing process."
No surprises here. The opening decades of the nineteenth century found many people encountering others whose personalities, politics and culture were quite different from their own. And in this space, as Barth says, a particular culture emerged. It did as much when a motley crew found new ways of coping with with one another.
Next week, we take up the issue of civility in urban America via a select reading from John F. Kasson's Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America. It's a perfect bridge to the following week's Barth reading. For sure, two weeks hence we will discover the ways Barth allows us to see how people learned restraint (often while still fighting) in baseball parks. At the time, spectator sports became a critical part of an urbanizing and industrializing America. Perhaps all of these ideas will crystallize when the students and I visit Rickwood Field in Birmingham and learn more about the history of baseball in America with Dr. Richard Megraw from UA's Department of American Studies.
As a prelude to that trip - and Alabama playing Florida next Saturday (As a University of Miami grad and Miami-native, I'm especially looking forward to this game!) - we'll also pay some measure of attention to civility and sports. That discussion requires a closer look at commoners and aristocrats in and outside the urban space. From cockfighting, billiards and horse-racing to rowing and the beginnings of football in the land that will become these United States, we'll have much to think about.
When do Americans begin to collectively learn the merits of self-discipline and emotional control and why is this still a work in progress here and elsewhere? How do capitalism, gender and class figure in, according to Kasson? How do we widen our scope of inquiry to include other differences like race, ethnicity and region?
Where have I been? I only learned about Mo'ne Davis, a star Little League pitcher yesterday. Her accomplishments have gotten me more excited than ever about our field trip to Rickwood Field in Birmingham. UA's Dr. Richard Megraw, scholar of baseball and other American matters, will oversee our visit with Dr. John Beeler, a UA historian and baseball enthusiast, also in tow.The class will travel there on September 27 to learn about the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team, but also about how baseball figures into the emergence of urban life.
I have to admit baseball moves a little too slow for me. As a spectator, I love the energy of football and basketball more. I say this even though I can be found walking around campus wearing a New York Yankees cap in honor of my Mississippi-born, former sharecropping grandfather who - egads! - loved both the Yankees and the New York Jets.
With Mo'ne now front and center in the public's imagination, I will be more attentive. Certainly her name came up this morning in an National Public Radio wrap-up on sports. She also made the New York Times. It was interesting to see how so many of the readers made more of her skill and gender in the comment section than her race (I cautiously think that's progress). The NPR piece tackles race, however, especially as it relates to how economics figures into who gets to and who doesn't get to play little league sports,which sometimes involves more money for travel and uniforms than low-income families have.
For me, such a topic brought the story of baseball full circle. Unlike football, which began with Ivy League schools, baseball was initially a product of the the urban space (this, too, is quite interesting as the diamond evokes a "pastoral setting," as Gunter Barth writes). As aristocrats turned to horse racing and cricket, mid-nineteenth century working class men turned to this sport to get away from their daily routines in an industrializing and urbanizing America. Race, ethnic and class divisions became more evident as baseball grew in popularity. By the 1890s, there was a growing interest in not just this sport, but other ones. Throughout it all, people built for a moment, if not a lifetime, a sense of community. We will learn more about the idea of community in the urban space via baseball and other things that transformed small town American life in the coming weeks. There will also be room to reflect on how the idea of what it means to be "urban" has changed across time. I mean, Thomas Jefferson, one of the "Founding Fathers," saw America's future not in cities, but on the countrysides. When did cities become significant spaces in the United States? What leads to their decline and for some, a seeming revival? How do race, ethnicity, class and gender figure into the answers to such questions?
Finally, we will want to be curious about how baseball history seems to slip unnoticed into everyday life. In an earlier blog post, I certainly mentioned how one of my favorite scenes in the movie Love and Basketballfinds a young man (Omar Epps) jokingly asking his future basketball-playing girlfriend (Sanaa Lathan) if she's taking "Spalding" to the spring dance. Spalding, the name on her basketball, is none other than A.G. Spalding, nineteenth century pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings and Chicago White Stockings and later, a businessman.
Baseball player A.G. Spalding went on to become a businessman.
