Baseball's Third Commissioner and His Four Decades of Shaping the Game
Many baseball observers have viewed Ford Frick as an ineffective commissioner of Major League Baseball, largely manipulated by the league's owners, and more of an observer than a changemaker during his tenure from 1951 to 1965. Dave Bohmer challenges this perception, presenting Frick as a key figure in some of the massive changes baseball ......
Jackie Robinson, Montreal, and the Breaking of Baseball's Color Barrier
The story of Jackie Robinson's prodigious talent, his courageous journey, and his influence on both the game of baseball and American society writ large has been told well and often. What hasn't been told is the full story of his first season in the minor leagues in Montreal. In 1946, before moving up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson spent a ......
Literary Genealogies of an Indigenous Intellectual in Nineteenth-Century Peru
Thomas Ward examines Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's seventeenth-century work and how it influenced post-independence Peruvian literature in the nineteenth century. As literati struggled to define their fledgling Peruvian Republic, they found inspiration in the dual-heritage author Garcilaso de la Vega's previously banned work, Royal Commentaries. ......
Texas, Workingmen, and Professional Baseball in 1888
The Texas League's first baseball season in 1888 took place during a turbulent political, economic, and cultural time in Texas. Amid the millions of acres of wild and rural Texas frontier boomed the cities of Galveston, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin, where the new state capitol building had just opened. The Texas economy was ......
Born into slavery in free territory, Joseph Godfrey died widely reviled for his controversial role in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Separated from his mother at age five when his enslaver sold her, Godfrey sought refuge in his teens among the Dakota people he had befriended as a child. Godfrey married a Dakota woman and was living with his family ......
Winner of the 2025 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies Finalist for the 2024 National Jewish Book Award Honorable Mention for the 2023-2024 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Book Prize Between the Wires tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ......
Determining the Greatest Players in Golf Using Sabermetrics
Ever wonder whether Tiger Woods in his prime would have beaten Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, or Jack Nicklaus in their primes? And could any of them have beaten Babe Zaharias? Obviously, if Bobby Jones were returned to life and health and then given his old hickory-shafted mashie, persimmon-headed driver, and rubber-core ball in a match against Jordan ......
At the end of the nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal glorified cubanas as "the most feminine and simple women in the world." Ever since, the stereotype of Cuban femininity as chaste and dutiful has informed Cubans' racial, social, and ethnic identity in the dominant American imagination, and this gendered and ......
The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention In Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung--Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between ......
