Exploring the experience of Jewish immigrants in America in the first half of the twentieth century, this book asks the question: What part did sport play in the process by which these people became Americans?

In Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, Peter Levine vividly recounts the stories of Red Auerbach, Hank Greenberg, Moe Berg, Sid Luckman, Nat Holman, Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, Marty Glickman, and a host of others who became Jewish heroes and symbols of the difficult struggle for American success. From settlement houses and street corners, to Madison Square and Fenway Park, their experiences recall a time when Jewish males dominated sports like boxing and basketball, helping to smash stereotypes about Jewish weakness while instilling American Jews with a fierce pride in their strength and ability in the face of Nazi aggression, domestic anti-Semitism, and economic depression. Full of marvelous stories, anecdotes, and personalities, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field enhances our understanding of the Jewish-American experience as well as the struggles of other American minority groups.

Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. This book traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.

To many, an association between Jews and sports seems almost oxymoronic--yet Jews have been prominent in boxing, basketball, and fencing, and some would argue that hurler Sandy Koufax is America's greatest athlete ever. In Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship, Jack Kugelmass shows that sports--significant in constructing nations and in determining their degree of exclusivity--also figures prominently in the Jewish imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection brings together the perspectives of anthropologists and historians to provide both methodological and regional comparative frameworks for exploring the meaning of sports for a minority population.

At a time when many baseball fans wish for the game to return to a purer past, G. Edward White shows how seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game, transformed baseball into the national pastime. Not simply a professional sport, baseball has been treated as a focus of childhood rituals and an emblem of American individuality and fair play throughout much of the twentieth century. It started out, however, as a marginal urban sport associated with drinking and gambling. White describes its progression to an almost mythic status as an idyllic game, popular among people of all ages and classes. He then recounts the owner's efforts, often supported by the legal system, to preserve this image. Baseball grew up in the midst of urban industrialization during the Progressive Era, and the emerging steel and concrete baseball parks encapsulated feelings of neighborliness and associations with the rural leisure of bygone times. According to White, these nostalgic themes, together with personal financial concerns, guided owners toward practices that in retrospect appear unfair to players and detrimental to the progress of the game. Reserve clauses, blacklisting, and limiting franchise territories, for example, were meant to keep a consistent roster of players on a team, build fan loyalty, and maintain the game's local flavor. These practices also violated anti-trust laws and significantly restricted the economic power of the players. Owners vigorously fought against innovations, ranging from the night games and radio broadcasts to the inclusion of African-American players. Nonetheless, the image of baseball as a spirited civic endeavor persisted, even in the face of outright corruption, as witnessed in the courts' leniency toward the participants in the Black Sox scandal of 1919. White's story of baseball is intertwined with changes in technology and business in America and with changing attitudes toward race and ethnicity. The time is fast approaching, he concludes, when we must consider whether baseball is still regarded as the national pastime and whether protecting its image is worth the effort.

This volume examines the ways in which sport shapes the experiences of various immigrant and minority groups and, in particular, looks at the relationship between sport, ethnic identity and ethnic relations. The articles in this volume are concerned primarily with British, American and Australian sporting traditions and the themes covered include the consolidation of ethnic identity in host societies through participation immigrant sports and exclusive sporting organizations, assimilation into host' societies through participation in indigenous, national sports, and the construction by outsiders of separate ethnic identities according to sporting criteria.

This book explores how American sports, especially basketball, baseball and American football, have projected the US into the world, and brought the world into America. Taking a chronological approach it traces the development of American sports from the turn of the 20th century, highlighting how international forces such as immigration, geopolitics and war have influenced the trajectory of sport in the US, and thus the American experience. DuBois also considers the globalization of American sport and how this soft power shaped international relations throughout the American century. Addressing key questions about the role of sport in the rise of the United States, it frames themes that have come to define sports history; gender, race, economics and politics. It argues that while sport has not necessarily been a catalyst for change, it has often mirrored social issues, and sometimes served as an important tool of progress. Synthesizing major works alongside primary sources, the chapters study boxing, hockey, track and field and soccer alongside the 'big three' (basketball, baseball and American football) through a number of case studies to offer a novel interpretation of American sport history. Spanning early Native American sport, the export of baseball in the American empire, the role of basketball in the Cold War, the influence of immigrants and women in sports, and modern day sport culture, American Sport in International History asks what the role of sport has been and will be in a shifting international environment.