In They Will Have Their Game , Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these ‘sporting’ activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others.
They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as ‘races’ and business as a ‘game.’ The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as ‘gentility’ and ‘respectability, ‘ and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.
Daftar Isi
Introduction: The Meaning of Sport
Part One: The Colonial Period
1. The Rise of Genteel Sport
2. A Revolution in Sporting Culture
Part Two: The Early National Period
3. Sport Reborn
4. Prestige or Profit
Part Three: The Antebellum Period
5. A Mass Sporting Industry
6. Sporting Cultures
Epilogue: Change and Persistence
Tentang Penulis
Kenneth Cohen is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware
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