Ambassadors in Pinstripes
The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire
-
- 44,99 €
-
- 44,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Inspired and led by sporting magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding, two teams of baseball players circled the globe for six months in 1888-1889 competing in such far away destinations as Australia, Sri Lanka and Egypt. These players, however, represented much more than mere pleasure-seekers. In this lively narrative, Zeiler explores the ways in which the Spalding World Baseball Tour drew on elements of cultural diplomacy to inject American values and power into the international arena. Through his chronicle of baseball history, games, and experiences, Zeiler explores expressions of imperial dreams through globalization's instruments of free enterprise, webs of modern communication and transport, cultural ordering of races and societies, and a strident nationalism that galvanized notions of American uniqueness. Spalding linked baseball to a U.S. presence overseas, viewing the world as a market ripe for the infusion of American ideas, products and energy. Through globalization during the Gilded Age, he and other Americans penetrated the globe and laid the foundation for an empire formally acquired just a decade after their tour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pro ballplayers playing exhibitions in the distant East, the sport beset by labor strife as management uses cutting-edge technologies to sell the game to an international audience. Sounds like last week, right? How about 1888? The common gripe runs that baseball is now too dominated by business priorities but according to Zeiler, a history professor at the University of Colorado, things weren't any different 118 years ago. The first great evangelist of baseball, equipment manufacturer Albert Spalding sought to spread the largely eastern and midwestern pastime to every corner of the world, planning a westward winter tour of all-star teams, starting Down Under, then moving to Egypt, and ending with a Grand Tour of Europe. Zeiler's sober academic treatment includes discussions of labor strife, racial hierarchies and what might be called proto-globalism. Even if the subtitle overreaches, isolating the roots of internationalism for our "national" pastime isn't as absurd as it sounds: after all, at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the U.S.A. was outdone by Australia and Italy both stops on Spalding's tour.
