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They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic

Online ISBN:
9781501714214
Print ISBN:
9781501705496
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic

Kenneth Cohen
Kenneth Cohen
Smithsonian National Museum of American History
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Published online:
20 September 2018
Published in print:
15 December 2017
Online ISBN:
9781501714214
Print ISBN:
9781501705496
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

They Will Have Their Game explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Drawing on unparalleled research into the personal papers of the investors behind sporting events, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others. The book tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how elites gradually conceded their hopes for exclusive gentility and embraced a more democratic and commercial mass sporting culture while maintaining power by agreeing to limit access according to race and gender as well as incubating respect for wealth and offices won on the allegedly open and level playing fields of electoral “races” and the “game” of business. Compelling narratives about individual participants illustrate the negotiations by which sporting discourse and experience created opportunities for self-assertion across class, racial, and gender boundaries even as they also normalized economic and political inequality along those lines. In the end, Cohen’s arguments question the influence of ideas such as “gentility” and “respectability” in the standard narrative of commercial popular culture, and 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 that puts sporting activities at the center rather than the margins of economic and political history.

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