Commissioned by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum with funding from Major League Baseball, this work chronicles the Negro Leagues era, combining on-field reportage with historical context.

Remember all of the places you visited as a child... then revisited as an adult...The memories come flooding back, all the places you had been, the things you had seen, and the memories associated with them... now you see these places with all of the changes and the new memories to be made...With a family history in Mahanoy Area, Schuylkill County is one of these places for Photographer Naomi R. Heckler.She has captured some of these memories to share with all of us...The restoration of a Library and the Central Train Station, the beauty of an early fall snow storm, the serenity of the natural surroundings, the modern ways of power and the beauty of hard work...All in black and white and shades of grey.These are just a few of the special memories Naomi has captured to share with all of us.

This book is a record of the men and events, team by team, during Major League Baseball's integration. It focuses especially on the owners, executives and managers who were the heroes, villains or spectators of integration, and it sheds new light on the unheralded champions of integration and on those whose culpability has so far been overlooked. Individual chapters cover each of baseball's integration-era teams, and a final chapter covers expansion teams of the 1960s. Each team's responsible individuals are examined, its acquisition, deployment and treatment of black players documented, and the effect of its integration actions on team performance analyzed. Appendices provide populations of integration-era Major League cities, first black players by team, first black players in various minor leagues, rosters of black players by team, a timeline of black player milestones, and a list of black All-Star selections through 1969.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige “Among the rare biographies of an athlete that transcend sports . . . gives us the man as well as the myth.”—The Boston Globe Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories before, and retracing Paige’s steps across the continent. Here is the stirring account of the child born to an Alabama washerwoman with twelve young mouths to feed, the boy who earned the nickname “Satchel” from his enterprising work as a railroad porter, the young man who took up baseball on the streets and in reform school, inventing his trademark hesitation pitch while throwing bricks at rival gang members. Tye shows Paige barnstorming across America and growing into the superstar hurler of the Negro Leagues, a marvel who set records so eye-popping they seemed like misprints, spent as much money as he made, and left tickets for “Mrs. Paige” that were picked up by a different woman at each game. In unprecedented detail, Tye reveals how Paige, hurt and angry when Jackie Robinson beat him to the Majors, emerged at the age of forty-two to help propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. He threw his last pitch from a big-league mound at an improbable fifty-nine. (“Age is a case of mind over matter,” he said. “If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”) More than a fascinating account of a baseball odyssey, Satchel rewrites our history of the integration of the sport, with Satchel Paige in a starring role. This is a powerful portrait of an American hero who employed a shuffling stereotype to disarm critics and racists, floated comical legends about himself–including about his own age–to deflect inquiry and remain elusive, and in the process methodically built his own myth. “Don’t look back,” he famously said. “Something might be gaining on you.” Separating the truth from the legend, Satchel is a remarkable accomplishment, as large as this larger-than-life man.

James T. Farrell and Baseball is a social history of baseball on Chicago’s South Side, drawing on the writings of novelist James T. Farrell along with historical sources. Charles DeMotte shows how baseball in the early decades of the twentieth century developed on all levels and in all areas of Chicago, America’s second largest city at the time, and how that growth intertwined with Farrell’s development as a fan and a writer who used baseball as one of the major themes of his work. DeMotte goes beyond Farrell’s literary focus to tell a larger story about baseball on Chicago’s South Side during this time—when Charles Comiskey’s White Sox won two World Series and were part of a rich baseball culture that was widely played at the amateur, semipro, and black ball levels. DeMotte highlights the 1919–20 Black Sox fix and scandal, which traumatized not only Farrell and Chicago but also baseball and the broader culture. By tying Farrell’s fictional and nonfictional works to Chicago’s vibrant baseball history, this book fills an important gap in the history of baseball during the Deadball Era.

This book studies how poetic structure transforms verbal imitations of religious experience into concepts. The book investigates how such a conceptual language can convey such non-conceptual experiences as meditation, ecstasy or mystic insights. Briefly, it explores how the poet, by using words, can express the 'ineffable'. It submits to close reading English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and Hebrew texts, from the Bible, through medieval, renaissance, metaphysical, and baroque poetry, to romantic and symbolistic poetry.

Approaching the Threshold of Mystery brings two recently estranged strands of theology back together, to explore the same 'liturgical worlds' and to chart 'theological spaces'. The editors have assembled a formidable group of scholars from systematic and liturgical theology with the express purpose of examining the mystery of the liturgy with both expert perspectives in mind. The result is thirteen essays that return to a more 'synoptic' theology, seeing speculative and liturgical approaches as united together for a common purpose, and ultimately approaching the same mysterious, sacred reality. In today's fragmented world, this approach is sorely needed, and although many postmodern authors point out the need for healing this division, this volume actually attempts to bridge the disciplinary divide by placing specialists within the same prayerful 'space', oriented towards something greater than what is merely enacted in human words and deeds.