The History of Baseball The United States is credited with developing several popular sports, including some (such

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Heather Quashnie

The History of Baseball

        The  is credited with developing several popular sports, including some (such as baseball, football, and basketball) that have large fan bases and have been adopted internationally. But baseball, despite the spread of the game throughout the globe and the growing influence of Asian and Latin American leagues and players, is the sport that Americans still recognize as their “national pastime.” It was nationalistic sentiment that helped to make baseball “America's game.” In the quest to obtain greater cultural understanding, Americans yearned for a sport they could claim as their own. A powerful confirmation of baseball as the sport to fill that need came in 1907 when a special commission appointed by , a sporting goods magnate who had formerly been a star pitcher and an executive with a baseball team, reported that baseball owed absolutely nothing to England and the children's game of rounders. Instead, the commission claimed that, to the best of its knowledge baseball had been invented by  at , New York, in 1839. This origin myth was perpetuated for decades.

        As early as the 1850s, baseball images began to appear in periodicals, and, in the 20th century, popular illustrator  often used baseball as the subject for his The Saturday Evening Post covers.  and "" remain among the best-known poems and songs, respectively, among Americans. Novelists and filmmakers frequently have turned to baseball as subjects. American colleges and universities began to offer courses on baseball literature, and baseball films likewise proliferated. In 1994 the Public Broadcasting System released  nostalgic , arguably the most monumental historical television documentary ever made.

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        For a brief time in the 1880s, before  became the norm in the United States,  players competed with whites in professional baseball. After that period, however, blacks had to carve out a separate world of baseball. Dozens of black teams faced local semiprofessional teams while storming throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Despite playing a high quality of baseball, the players frequently engaged in various forms of clowning that continued stereotypes of blacks to appeal to spectators. From the 1920s until the '50s, separate black professional leagues "the s"  existed as well, but in 1947  crossed the ...

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