Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 232
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Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-0-7425-5168-8 • Hardback • September 2006 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-0-7425-5169-5 • Paperback • September 2006 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
978-0-7425-6983-6 • eBook • September 2006 • $47.00 • (£36.00)
Thomas W. Zeiler is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, and the End of World War II, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT, Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad and co-author of Globalization and the American Century.
1 Introduction: Baseball, Globalization, and Empire 2 Marketing: Albert Spalding's Chicago 3 Movement: The American West 4 An Empire of Race: Southern Seas 5 Old and New World Cultures: Europe 6 National Identity: Return to America 7 Conclusion: Imperial Imagination 8 Bibliography
In 1888-89 two teams of professional baseball players squared off against one another on an international tour that included games in Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, and England. In this delightful book, Thomas Zeiler tells the story of this tour and puts it in the context of the imperial expansion of the United States that was so much a part of our diplomacy at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, this is baseball history for adults. On the other, it is a painless — even pleasurable — way tointroduce students to the global foreign policy that Americans would implement thereafter...
— Bruce Kuklick, University of Pennsylvania
Join ?Big Al? Spalding and his Base Ball tourists on their globetrotting mission to make America?s pastime into the world?s game. You won?t regret the trip. Thomas Zeiler draws on the most recent scholarship on such subjects as globalization, gender, tourism, sports history, and race, to show how Spalding?s mission was America?s mission in all of its idealistic self-interested complexity. Highly informative and fun to read, Ambassadors in Pinstripes is an ideal book for courses on U.S. Foreign Relations,Sports History, and Gilded Age America...
— Marc Gallicchio
Pro ball players playing exhibitions in the distant East, the sport beset by labor strife as management uses cutting-edge technologies to sell the game to an international audience. Sounds like last week, right? How about 1888? The common gripe runs thatbaseball is now too dominated by business priorities?but according to Zeiler, things weren't any different 118 years ago....
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A thorough account of the then-unprecedented world baseball tour orchestrated by Albert Spalding (1888-89), relating to the heightened influence of the U.S. in international affairs. Recommended.....
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This is an interesting, well-conceived, ably contextualized, and accessibly written contribution to the literature of both US sport and cultural history....Zeiler is to be commended.....
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