The book analyzes the process by which the collective image of professional baseball was formed. It traces both the negation and the affirmation of ideas in the sports press that would impede or promote the growth of baseball from a recreational pastime to a team sport spectacle in the mid-19th century. The American collective image grew as a result of sports reportage, conversations about baseball in social and work groupings, game attendance (and changing values toward work and play), and reports of gambling. Newspaper editorials and news stories and letters to the editor are studied as to shifting and complex and inter-related sentiments toward playing baseball. Much of this interactive complex was influenced by the English sports ideal and newly formed attitudes toward recreation. Above all, the sports press was the primary shaper of the image of professional baseball.

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1911 Original Publisher: Eaton

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.