Baseball

Bruce Watson | Spring 2023

One hundred years ago this month, the “House That Babe Built” became the first true baseball stadium.

Editor's Note: Bruce Watson is a writer, historian, and contributing editor of American Heritage. You can read more of his work on his blog, The Attic.

Thanks for the Memories

Thomas Viets | September/October 2019

The Legend of Mickey Mantle

Randy Roberts, Johnny Smith | September/October 2019

He was unlike any other baseball star in America, a blond-haired boy from the heartland whose raw power and mythical purity made him a hero

History professors Roberts and Smith recently co-authored A Season in t

The Legend of Mickey Mantle

Randy Roberts, Johnny Smith | September/October 2019

He was unlike any other baseball star in America, a blond-haired boy from the heartland whose raw power and mythical purity made him a hero

History professors Roberts and Smith recently co-authored A Season in t

The House of David: A Midwest Cult REALLY Good at Baseball

Lauren Nicole | Summer 2019

A curious story of religion, sex, and baseball grew out of a long-forgotten postcard among her grandmother’s belongings.

Bill Veeck: The Maverick Who Changed Baseball

Paul Dickson | Summer 2017

Veeck changed baseball forever, integrating the American League in 1949 and creating a variety of stunts and promotions to bring more fans to the stadium.

Entering the friendly confines of Wrigley Field in Chicago, a first-time visitor cannot help but be struck by the panorama of ivy-covered brick outfield walls, the traditional manually operated scoreboard, and an overall scale and proportion that seems perfect for baseball.

The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson

Jules Tygiel | August/September 1984

He was a lieutenant in the Army of the United States: he saw no reason to sit in the back of the bus

ON JULY 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.

Play Ball!

Harry Katz | Summer 2009

In baseball's earliest years, players beaned baserunners and often had to flout town laws prohibiting the game

The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. As historians have debunked the widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins. In 1787, the same year the Constitution was written, a Worcester, Massachusetts, publisher printed A Little Pretty Pocket Book, the American edition of an English book for children, which included a poem and illustration dedicated to “base-ball.”

Sizzling Satchel Paige

Larry Tye | Spring 2010

The pitcher with the unhittable fireball deserves as much credit for breaking baseball’s color barrier as Jackie Robinson

The Greatest Series?

Allen Barra | October 2006

Just as the year changed the nation, so its World Series changed American sports

Glove Story

Frederic D. Schwarz | July/August 2000

BASEBALL WAS PLAYED FOR THIRTY YEARS BEFORE ANYONE THOUGHT ABOUT FINDING A WAY TO PROTECT PLAYERS’ FINGERS

Learning To Like Baseball

Geoffrey C. Ward | October 1994

WHAT HAPPENED when a historian largely indifferent to the subject set out to write the script for Ken Burns’s monumental new documentary

I’VE NEVER LIKED BASEBALL MUCH, IN part because my father has always loved it so.

Last Time Up

April 1990

In his last time at the plate, Ted Williams crushed a 440-foot home run deep to right field.

What I Learned From The Pirates

Robert Bendiner | September/October 1989

A lifelong baseball fan recalls his early days and explains the rewards of abject loyalty

Two months after the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series of 1909, my mother presented them with one of their most faithful fans—me.

Positively The Last Word On Baseball

Elting E. Morison | August/September 1986

Forget football, basketball, and all the other sports that are artificially regulated by the clock. Only baseball can truly reveal our national character. Only baseball can light our path to the future.

Baseball’s Greatest Pitcher

Andrew Kull | April/May 1985

It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still hold that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest that ever lived.

Greatest Season Performance by Major League Pitcher? One hundred years ago last summer, Charles Radbourn won 60 and lost 12 for the Providence Grays of the National League.

Baseball’s Greatest Song

John W. Ripley | June/july 1983

… illuminated by the hand-tinted slides that helped make it a hit

ONE NIGHT in 1888, from the stage of a Broadway theater, the actor DeWolf Hopper recited for the first time a poem about a ballplayer, known only as the Mighty Casey, who struck out.

The Old Ball Game

John Thorn | June/july 1983

A portfolio of rare photographs recalls baseball’s rough-and-tumble vintage era

PARADISE LOST . It is a sweet and on the whole harmless vision that prettifies the past of America and the game dearest to its heart.

The Man Who Didn’t Invent Baseball

Victor Salvatore | June/july 1983

Abner Doubleday had an eventful life, but as far as we know, he never gave a thought to the game with which his name is so firmly linked

SOME TWO hundred and fifty thousand people a year come to the little village of Cooperstown, in upstate New York, to visit the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame.

Spalding’s Austrian Baseball Tour.

October 1977

Albert Spalding’s middle name was Goodwill, which seemed fitting in 1888 when the baseball impresario and sporting goods king decided to take the game on a grand tour to parts of the world as yet unexposed to the glories of the American national pastime.

The Way I See It

Bruce Catton | April 1977

Like most authentic folk creations, baseball is deeply and obscurely rooted in the past and its moment of origin is cloaked in legend. There are innumerable threads that go back to the beginning of things, but nobody can follow them all the way.

Casey At The Bat

Martin Gardner | October 1967

The classic American baseball poem might have vanished if not for an actor's impromptu performance.

A mysterious phenomenon, to which professional critics are usually oblivious, reoccurs often in the literary history of the United States.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

Charles Boswell, Lewis Thompson | June 1960

Foul was fair, and fair foul, when eight players of the championship White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

Charles Boswell, Lewis Thompson | June 1960

Foul was fair, and fair foul, when eight players of the championship White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series

The Great American Game

Bruce Catton | April 1959

Baseball’s rules and rituals are much as they were fifty years ago and anything to win still goes.

A Century Of Cooperstown

December 1958

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Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

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Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

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