A Global History of Baseball

Catalog description

Baseball has been called America’s game, and the late, great historian Jacques Barzun once quipped that in order to understand the soul of America, one first had to understand baseball. This may be true about America, and if so, then it is equally true for many other areas of the world. Baseball, since the nineteenth century, has been an integral part of not just America’s sports culture but also that of countries from Japan to Taiwan to Venezuela to the Dominican Republic. This course will examine the origins of baseball from English bat and ball games such as Rounders, American missionaries introducing the game to Japan and Korea, baseball as a nationalist reaction to Spanish rule in Cuba, and, finally, the global reach of modern baseball as seen in such classic institutions as the Little League World Series.