A celebration of America's romance with baseball, this is the official companion volume to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's traveling exhibition. Featuring rare images and artifacts, plus more than 30 essays by writers, players, scholars, and fans—including John Grisham, Tom Brokaw, Dave Berry, Roger Kahn, Paul Simon, George Plimpton, and Penny Marshall, Baseball As America explores every rich facet of the national pastime, showing how the game has served as both a public reflection of and a catalyst for the evolution of American culture and society.
The volume reveals how the American landscape, language, literature, entertainment, food, and summertime living all bear the mark of this 19th-century game that has become inextricably intertwined with our nation's values, aspirations, and character.
In the spring of 2002, the National Baseball Hall of Fame launched a landmark four-year traveling exhibition that premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York is now on tour to leading museums in nine major cities across the United States. The show brings the Hall of Fame's treasures, including rare baseball images and artifacts, to every American in a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of the game that has defined our nation.
National Geographic is proud to offer the official companion book to this groundbreaking event. In examining such formative phenomena as immigration, industrialization, popular culture, and technology, it reveals how baseball has served as both a public reflection of and a catalyst for the evolution of American culture and society. This book also examines how the American landscape, our language, literature, entertainment, food, and summertime living all bear the mark of a 19th-century game that has become inextricably intertwined with our nation's values and aspirations.
A handsome volume, Baseball As America also features more than 200 original and archival photographs that bring the game to life on its pages. Perfect for every baseball fan, indeed every American, this comprehensive panorama of the game America has grown up with will foster a new appreciation not only for the game but also for the very character of our nation.
"Worth savoring as much for its prose as its pictures."—USA Today
"Classy...glossy, lavishly illustrated album that explores baseball's place in American culture." —Associated Press
"The game's history is magniÞcent and it is all captured in this wonderful book!" —George Brett
"What a great book! Reading Baseball As America is like taking a trip to Cooperstown." —Tom Seaver
