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 ......
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 ......
Fish Cars and Fish Culture explores the intersection between the development of railroads and fish culture during the last half of the 1800s. R. W. Hafer traces how the growth in the railroad industry, both in terms of its technology and its geographic reach, assisted the newly formed U.S. Fish Commission in its attempt to restore the nation's ......
The Missouri River is one of the most dangerous rivers in the United States--and one of the most economically important. Even as prolonged drought in the Midwest has imperiled urban drinking water and agricultural water supplies, parched regions in the basin far from the river have proposed piping water from the Missouri to alleviate their own ......
How the Czech Republic's Amateur Underdogs Became World Baseball Classic Heroes
Despite long odds and low funds, the Czech Republic's national baseball team of amateur players managed to shock the world at the 2023 World Baseball Classic--the sport's World Cup--when they took an upset win against Spain in the WBC qualifiers and then defeated China in the actual tournament, securing their place in the upcoming 2026 tournament. ......
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. ......
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 ......
Against Affect interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other nonnormative subjects ......
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 ......
