In Inventing Baseball Heroes, Amber Roessner examines "herocrafting" in sports journalism through an incisive analysis of the work surrounding two of baseball's most enduring personalities -- Detroit Tigers outfielder Ty Cobb and New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson. While other scholars have demonstrated that the mythmakers of the Golden Age of Sports Writing (1920--1930) manufactured heroes out of baseball players for the mainstream media, Roessner probes further, with a penetrating...

With the rise of Jimmy Carter, the 1976 presidential election proved a transformative moment in US history, heralding a change in terms of how candidates run for public office and how the news media cover their campaigns.Amber Roessner's Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign chronicles a change in the negotiation of political image-craft and the role it played in Carter's meteoric rise to the presidency. She contends that Carter's under...

Known most prominently as a daring anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) worked tirelessly throughout her life as a political advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and members of the working class. Despite her significance, until the 1970s Wells-Barnett’s life, career, and legacy were relegated to the footnotes of history. Beginning with the posthumously published autobiography edited and released by her daughter Alfreda in 1970, a handful of biographers and hist...

If baseball is America's national religion, then the Hall of Fame is its High Church. Being named among its 286 inductees makes you the closest thing our country has to an undisputed hero - even a secular saint. But the men in the Hall of Fame are no angels. Among their number are gamblers, drunks, race-baiters, at least one murderer, and perhaps the greatest collection of bona fide characters ever to be dignified by an honor of any kind.This is the book the Hall of Fame deserves. ...

“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The NumberIn Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles a...

It’s difficult to imagine today—when the Super Bowl has virtually become a national holiday and the National Football League is the country’s dominant sports entity—but pro football was once a ramshackle afterthought on the margins of the American sports landscape. In the span of a single generation in postwar America, the game charted an extraordinary rise in popularity, becoming a smartly managed, keenly marketed sports entertainment colossus whose action is ideally suited to television ...

Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, Russell began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racia...

**Now with bonus material on the Chicago Cubs' World Series win, the New York Times-bestselling history of America's most beloved baseball stadium, Wrigley Field, and the Cubs’ century-long search for World Series gloryIn A Nice Little Place on the North Side, leading columnist George Will returns to baseball with a deeply personal look at his hapless Chicago Cubs and their often beatified home, Wrigley Field, as it enters its second century. Baseball, Wi...

Ty Cobb was one of the most famous baseball players who every lived. The author puts Cobb into the context of his times, describing the very different game on the field then, and successfully probes Cobb's complex personality.

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest—these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team—the first dynasty of the 20th century.Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season—the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants an...

New York Times bestselling author Yaeger tells the electrifying story of the game that broke down the last racial division in college football.

The definitive history of the most dominant team in American sports historyNo superlatives are equal to the Boston Celtics of the 1960s. From 1959 to 1966 they won championship after championship, an eight-in-a-row streak that outshines any other in American sports. Led by coach Red Auerbach, center Bill Russell, and point guard Bob Cousy, they played a kind of basketball that seemed to come from an earlier era. Auerbach's Celtics played clean, honest, and strong, w...