To study sport in America prior to 1865 is to examine the origins of many popular activities, as well as to uncover many antiquated and now obscure forms of play. More importantly, it is also to explore how American society and culture took shape and the reasons its development unfolded as it did. Without exception, the best modern work by historians who study sport in the colonial, early national, and antebellum eras analyzes the social and cultural meanings of sporting activity in light of some combination of cultural values, social structures, and environmental factors. It is worth noting that from the outset serious historians of sport sought to uncover links between sport and wider society. But the concerns that animated such studies have varied profoundly. A baseball example illustrates the fundamental change in historical approaches from the earliest days. Perhaps the first formal inquiry about an American sport took place around the turn of the twentieth century. Undertaken by Abraham G. Mills, president of the National League, at the behest of Albert Goodwill Spalding – former player, club owner, and by then a sporting goods magnate – it aimed to settle a debate within the baseball community about the origins of the game. Had baseball evolved from the English game of rounders or was it, as Spalding and others insisted, a uniquely American invention? The Mills Commission favored the latter conclusion from the outset and constructed the myth of Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown on the flimsiest of evidence (Seymour 1960). In contrast, modern historians are interested in the Doubleday story, if at all, largely as a cultural construct (Block 2005). The nature of the relationship between rounders and baseball remains of interest to the extent that it helps mark the emergence of modern sports from traditional folk games. Far from attempting to establish or bolster American exceptionalism, as Mills and Spalding were determined to do, scholars today seek to explore such subjects as the relationship between the emergence of baseball and factors like urbanization and industrialization (Adelman 1986; Goldstein 1989; Riess 1989). It is not much of an overstatement to say that serious modern scholarship addresses the meaning of sport at least as much as it concerns itself with the development of a sport on the field or track or in the ring. The study of sport has earned a respected place in the eyes of the historical profession, but for many years the opposite view held sway.
For decades, the academy largely ignored sport as a serious subject of study. One rare exception occurred in 1917, when Frederick L. Paxson examined the rise of sport in an article published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now the Journal of American History), the flagship journal in the field of United States history. Reflecting the immense influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” Paxson (1917) characterized the emergence of sport as an artifact of the shift from a rural to an urban society. His view of urban life was anything but benign, and sport represented a needed release from the drudgery of factory work and tensions of crowded urban conditions. Given his analytical approach, it is unsurprising that Paxson had almost nothing to say about the period prior to the Civil War. A decade later John Allen Krout (1929) produced the first serious comprehensive history of sport in America, and in 1940 Krout’s student, Foster Rhea Dulles, published the most influential early history of US sport, America Learns to Play (1965 [1940]). As his title implies, Dulles, like Paxson and Krout, was primarily interested in charting the origins and development of major American sports. Dulles treated his subject seriously and was alert to the suspect nature of the Cooperstown myth. However, he largely focused on the post-Civil War period, other than noting a handful of horse races, boxing matches, and baseball games in the earlier era. His work stood, along with Krout’s, for many years as the only scholarly attempts to survey sport history in the United States. When Harold Seymour proposed baseball as the topic of his doctoral thesis at Cornell in 1956, he had to convince several dubious members of the faculty that the national pastime was a legitimate subject of historical inquiry (Seymour 1960: v). Occasional exceptions, such as in the work of Carl Bridenbaugh (1938, 1955) on colonial cities, were still brief and cursory. Until well past the mid twentieth century, that skeptical attitude toward sport history prevailed within the historical profession.
Shortly before World War II began, however, a seminal work appeared in Europe that was a harbinger of changing attitudes about what history could and should encompass. In 1938 the eminent Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1955 [1938]). As the author of one of the leading studies of medieval Europe, Huizinga had impeccable credentials as a historian. Homo Ludens was a nuanced history of play in Europe, but even more than that it argued for the central importance of play in human society. The book was translated into English and appeared in 1955, at roughly the period when conventions about the proper focus of history were breaking down in a number of areas. A work that has stood the test of time, it remains a key foundation in the study of all forms of leisure.
One final pioneer of sport history in the United States deserves mention. John R. Betts was, like Foster Rhea Dulles, a student of John Krout who continued the Columbia professor’s belief that sport was a topic worthy of serious study. In 1953 Betts published “The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sports, 1850–1900,” in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. As the title indicates, the temporal focus of this article lies mostly outside the scope of the present chapter. Its main concern remains in an important sense traditional – the development of institutional sport. But more than any previous scholar Betts began to move beyond the interpretation of sport as a safety valve to explore afresh the relationship between the forces of modernization in the nineteenth century and the rise of organized play. Betts (1953b) saw the emergence of sport as a benign product of industrialization rather than a marker of its pathology. This article represents an important step in moving the study of sport from the margins to the mainstream, although it was to be another 20 years or so before sport became fully accepted. All the while, Betts (1953a, 1955, 1968) continued to bring out articles in major journals on such topics as changing attitudes within the medical profession about the importance of leisure and exercise to overall health. Tragically, Betts died on the eve of completing his own overview of the history of sport in the United States, which was published as America’s Sporting Heritage, 1850–1950 (1974). Analysis is not its strength – the term “encyclopedic” is used by almost everyone who comments on the book – but it rests on a prodigious amount of primary research, and served as an inspiration and starting point for many a subsequent project. And, as its title indicates, for Betts the important story began only toward the close of the antebellum era.
In sum, sport in general long remained a marginal subject of study for historians. The small number of works that did appear prior to the mid twentieth century largely focused on the post-Civil War era because the major task was conceived as chronicling major modern sports and sporting institutions. But in the 1960s a pronounced series of shifts – toward social and cultural history, toward history “from the bottom up,” and the growing use of analytical and conceptual tools from a range of academic disciplines – helped inaugurate a new era in the study of sport and society. As one element in that shift, historians turned with fresh eyes to the years before, including long before, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first overtly professional baseball team, colleges developed modern football, James Naismith nailed a peach basket to a pole, and other similar milestones of American sport history.
Because research has centered predominantly on British America, most examinations of sport in the early colonial period begin with an account of athletic games and leisure pastimes in Britain. 1 Richard Holt (1988) coined the term “festive culture” to describe an extensive set of activities ranging from May Day celebrations to parish feasts which featured physical contests and demonstrations of various sorts. Holt focuses on the small agricultural villages that housed the majority of early modern Britain’s population. The culture he describes was attuned to the rhythms and values of traditional farming. Festive culture varied by region and even from village to village, but everywhere it represented an amalgam of folk values and practices, some of which were of pre-Christian origin. The ecclesiastical calendar provided numerous opportunities for relief from work to celebrate the local saint’s day, and seasonal holidays reflected the key stages of the planting and harvesting cycle. Games and contests figured prominently in all these celebrations, with certain physical activities being associated with specific occasions in many regions. Violence often attended these contests. For Holt, festive culture was central to the lives of early modern Britons. It allowed them to display physical prowess, express thanks for crops, court the opposite sex, evade formal strictures about appropriate behavior, and find escape from the harshness and repetition of everyday life (see also Malcolmson 1973; Struna 1996: 11–24).
How then did this festive culture transfer to the New World? The most exhaustive exploration of the transfer of folk culture from Britain to her North American colonies says little about sport directly. David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) devotes about a dozen out of 898 pages of t...
