Book ID: CBB062422855

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic (2020)

unapi

Kenneth Cohen (Author)


Cornell University Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 336
Language: English

In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others. They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to 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 in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB062422855/

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Authors & Contributors
Stephen Secules
Alan Meades
Davies, Sarah R.
Susanne Schmidt
Rachel E. Walker
Avery, Shane Patrick
Concepts
Popular culture
Masculinity
Leisure and leisure industry
Gender
Contests; competitions
Democracy
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
17th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
London (England)
Russia
Massachusetts (U.S.)
Brazil
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