"Pennsylvania Sports," And: "Baseball in Pennsylvania" (Review)

"Pennsylvania Sports," and: "Baseball in Pennsylvania" (review)

Karen Guenther

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Volume 77, Number 1, Winter 2010, pp. 73-76 (Review)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pnh.0.0009

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/369610

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] WEBSITE REVIEWS

eff Silverman and Charles Hardy, III. “Pennsylvania Sports,” in JExplorepahistory.com. http://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=32

Jeff Silverman and Charles Hardy, III. “Baseball in Pennsylvania,” in Explorepahistory.com. http://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=2

The purpose of the website ExplorePAHistory.com is to provide an online resource that makes use of over 2,000 historical markers installed by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC). Visitors to the website can access historical information through “Stories from PA History,” plan tours and vacation trips through “Visit PA Regions,” and, for educators, access lesson plans to teach about Pennsylvania through “Teach PA History.” At its inception, members of the Pennsylvania Historical Association were involved as consultants to ensure historical accuracy, but PHA’s active participation has declined

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since the website launched in the spring of 2003. To date, thirty “stories” have been made available to the public, and an additional seven are planned through 2010. Two of them, Pennsylvania Sports and Baseball in Pennsylvania , provide overviews of Pennsylvania’s sporting culture from colonial times to the early twenty-first century. Baseball in Pennsylvania, which first appeared in 2005, focuses on one sport that has a strong heritage in the Commonwealth. Author Jeff Silverman divides Pennsylvania’s baseball history into four chapters: Baseball in Pittsburgh, Baseball in Philadelphia, The Negro Leagues, and Small Town Baseball. In each of these chapters, Silverman provides a brief history of the topic, including embedded hyperlinks to related historical markers. These links connect to stories that supply additional information about the marker, including the marker’s location, dedication date, text, and “Behind the Marker” brief histories of the person, team, location, or event commemorated by the marker. Additional links connect to original documents that further illuminate the topic. Twenty-six historical markers related to Pennsylvania’s baseball history are explored in greater depth in this story, which also includes eight historical documents (two of which deal with the Pirates’ victory in the 1960 World Series). Furthermore, Baseball in Pennsylvania contains six lesson plans for use by elementary, middle, and high school teachers, an annotated bibliography, and a chronological timeline. Pennsylvania Sports, which debuted on the website in 2008, includes three chapters: “The Quest for Records and Titles,” “Recreational Sports and Leisure,” and “Pennsylvania Football.” Thirty-four historical markers are explored in this story, covering playing fields, personalities, events, and “Pennsylvania Firsts.” The focus is on sports other than baseball, as it includes not just football but also cycling, track and field, basketball, swimming, and tennis. Three lesson plans are available for teachers, along with twenty-four primary source documents. This story also includes a timeline and an annotated bibliography. One of the strengths of both websites is the inclusion of lesson plans for teachers. These lessons, also available from the homepage under “Teach PA History,” address such diverse topics as boxing, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the Negro Leagues, Pete Gray, and labor/management issues. Each lesson includes resources, assessments, and references, along with identifying related PDE standards. While these two stories are ambitious in their attempts to explore the history of sports in Pennsylvania, they occasionally provide erroneous and contradictory interpretations of events. For instance, according to Baseball in Pennsylvania ,

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“challenges of the reserve clause all failed until 1970 when St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood refused to be traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.” In the following sentence, author Jeff Silverman corrects this error: “Flood’s case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused—as it had in the past—to invalidate the clause.” If the Supreme Court did not invalidate the reserve clause, how did Flood succeed in challenging it, as Silverman contends in the previous sentence? In addition, Al Reach did not form the Phillies franchise in 1883; the Worcester Brown Stockings relocated to Philadelphia following the 1882 season. Site visitors, meanwhile, are invited to “vote” for Pennsylvania All-Stars, but the interactive does not work. Silverman and Hardy, meanwhile, have managed to resolve one of the key disputes in Pennsylvania’s sports history by anointing the Pottsville Maroons the champions of the National Football League in 1925 (the National Football League continues to recognize the Chicago Cardinals as champions that year, despite the combined efforts of Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, Steelers owner Dan Rooney, and Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell to rectify this error). Incidentally, the timeline states that in 1925 “The Pottsville Maroons lose the first National Football League championship game to the Frankford Yellow jackets from Philadelphia on a disputed call”—certainly a creative way of explaining why the National Football League did not award the Maroons the championship that year. The first NFL championship game, incidentally, was in 1933, and it did not involve any teams from Pennsylvania. The story content is not the only section that is affected by historical inaccuracy. Four zeroes (0000) appear as dates for several entries in the chronology for each of the stories, perhaps indicating that the authors did not know the date (although it should be possible to determine the year when the Pennsylvania Assembly first passed a law against sporting activity). Several of the historical markers incorrectly state the marker title; for instance, the historical marker information for Charles Albert “Chief” Bender in Cumberland County identifies him as “Charles Albert,” omitting his last name. Links also do not accurately access information; in the “Homestead Grays” Behind the Marker section, the authors refer to the Homestead Strike of 1892 as “one of the most infamous and bloody battles in the history of the American labor movement,” but the link that suppos- edly would connect the reader to the information for the Homestead Strike marker instead directs the site visitor to the Chocolate Workers’ Sit-Down Strike in Hershey in 1937.

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Unlike most of the other topics or themes covered on ExplorePAHistory. com, both Baseball in Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Sports examine topics that are not static. Both of these stories contain outdated information; certainly it is well-known that the Phillies did not win their only World Series title in 1980, and the Steelers have won the Super Bowl since 2005. Fortunately, because of the platform for disseminating information, both stories can be updated and corrected with relative ease. Otherwise, their primary use might develop into a scholastic exercise in which students research the mistakes instead of using the information to enhance their understanding of the role that sports in general and baseball in particular have played in Pennsylvania’s history.

KAREN GUENTHER Mansfield University

Dennis B. Downey, et al. “The Surest Foundation of Happiness: Education in Pennsylvania,” in Explorepahistory.com. http://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=40

Explorepahistory.com has a well-deserved reputation for excellence in docu- menting and disseminating the Commonwealth’s history through its “Stories from PA History” series, and its recently launched exploration of the history of education in Pennsylvania, The Surest Foundation of Happiness: Education in Pennsylvania , is certainly no exception. Though completely synthetic and designed primarily to satisfy curriculum requirements for elementary and high school classes, The Surest Foundation of Happiness will nonetheless impress experts with its scope and links to a vast array of documents and images. The Surest Foundation of Happiness is divided into four main “chapters” and an introductory overview. The chapters are thematic rather than chronological and explore topics like the growth of private education and the strug- gle for educational equality. Despite the chapters’ brevity (approximately fifteen hundred words each), they do an outstanding job of introducing readers to the many important individuals, groups and institutions that shaped Pennsylvania’s educational landscape. In addition, each chapter contains multiple links to a variety of primary sources supported by excellent analysis. A helpful bar on the left-hand side connects viewers to all of the primary documents, historical markers and images cited in each chapter,

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