MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving The
MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Aaron W. Miller Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________________ Erik N. Jensen, Director ____________________________________________ Andrew Cayton, Reader ____________________________________________ Kimberly Hamlin, Reader ____________________________________________ Kevin Armitage, Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT GLORIOUS SUMMER: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BASEBALL, 1861-1920 by Aaron W. Miller In the decades after the Civil War, Americans turned baseball, a fad from New York City, into their national obsession. Baseball’s apostles used the game’s Civil War experience to infuse it with militaristic, nationalistic, and patriotic themes. They mythologized the history of the game. Baseball’s explosive growth across the nation came with profound implications. Baseball formed a mass, united culture. Although Civil War soldiers played baseball to escape the dreariness and terror of life during war, the process of militarizing and imbuing the game with patriotic themes started even before the guns fell silent. As the sport spread nationally, it advanced a northern, middle-class vision of masculinity. Baseball shaped gender roles in the late nineteenth century. In the early days of baseball, women were important as spectators, yet the sporting culture lambasted their play. Of course, baseball also excluded racial minorities. Baseball’s promoters saw the game as a restorer of white masculinity, which many believed was atrophying. By the end of the dead-ball era, Americans thought that baseball was essential for national strength. Baseball helped reunify the nation after the sectional crisis. As Americans remembered the war, and baseball, in glorious military terms, they ignored the racial and political issues which drove the nation apart.
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