Baseball Before We Knew It

Auteur

David Block is a baseball historian and antiquarian. He is the author of Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (Nebraska, 2019). Tim Wiles is the former director of research for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and a coauthor of Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”**John Thorn is the official historian of Major League Baseball and the author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden.

Texte du rabat

In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this twentieth anniversary edition of Baseball before We Knew It is a unique and invaluable resource—a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America’s game.

Contenu

List of Illustrations
Foreword to the New Edition by John Thorn
Foreword by Tim Wiles
Preface to the New Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments for the New Edition
Acknowledgments

Base, as in Baseball
A Pocket(book)ful of Miracles

1. Uncertainty as to the Paternity
2. Rounders, Schmounders
3. Abner and Albert, the Missing Link by Philip Block
   Playing Ball at Camp Doubleday
4. Was Abner Graves Telling the Truth?
5. Rules of Baseball: The Prequel
6. How Slick Were the Knicks?
7. In the Beginning
8. Stools, Clubs, Stobs, and Jugs
9. Traps and Cats
10. It’s Starting to Look Familiar

11. Baseball before We Knew It

    Early Baseball Bibliography: Roots of the Game in Pre–Civil War Literature
    Appendix 1: Constitutions and By-Laws
    Appendix 2: Some Comments on Sporting Journals of the 1850s
    Appendix 3: “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball”: Baseball and Baseball-type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic by Thomas L. Altherr
    Appendix 4: The Letters of Abner Graves
    Appendix 5: Dr. Adam E. Ford’s Letter to Sporting Life
    Appendix 6: Battingball Games by Per Maigaard
    Appendix 7: Ten Surviving Descriptions of Baseball-like Games Written and Published before 1845
    Notes
    Principal Sources Consulted
    Index