Baseball and Cultural Heritage

The
influence of baseball heritage in society and culture

Baseball’s
past has been lauded, romanticized, and idealized, and much has been written
about both the sport and its history. This is the first volume to explore the
understudied side of baseball—how its heritage is understood, interpreted,
commodified, and performed for various purposes today.

These
essays reveal how baseball’s heritage can be a source of great enjoyment and
inspiration, tracing its influence on constructed environments, such as
stadiums and monuments, and food and popular culture. The contributors discuss
how its heritage can be used to address social, political, and economic aims
and agendas and can reveal tensions about whose past is remembered and whose is
laid aside. Contributors address race and racism in the sport, representations of
women in baseball, ballparks as repositories for baseball’s heritage, and the
role of museums in generating the game’s heritage narrative.

Providing
perspectives on the social impact and influence of baseball in the United
States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United
Kingdom, Baseball and Cultural Heritage
shows how the performance of baseball heritage can reflect the culture and
heritage of a nation.

A volume
in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel