| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War. By George B. Kirsch. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xviii, 145 pp. $19.95, ISBN 0-691-05733-8.)
As the greatest cataclysmic event in American history, the Civil War had an enormous impact on virtually all aspects of American life. The conventional wisdom has been that the war accelerated baseball's development as men from different classes and geographic backgrounds mixed together. George B. Kirsch in his excellent earlier book, The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838–72 (1989), pointed out that the war strongly affected cricket and baseball. Cricket suffered more severely from the era's turmoil than did baseball, which persisted and even progressed.	1
Kirsch focuses on baseball and the Civil War in this well-written 135-page text, aimed at the general reader (reasonable price, bibliographical essay, but no footnotes). Kirsch narrates and analyzes the growth and transformation of baseball during the war and examines the relationship between sport and American nationalism. He admits that by 1860 baseball was already referred to as the national pastime. Nonetheless, Kirsch argues that the war years were critical for the sport as Americans at the battlefront and the home front played baseball more than ever before. Playing was patriotic, and it was a vital part of soldier and civilian lives in Northern and Southern camps. Did Southerners and westerners learn the game from the Yankees? The evidence does not suggest they did.	. . .

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