They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic - Hardcover

Cohen, Kenneth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501705490 ISBN 13: 9781501705496

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2017

Synopsis

They Will Have Their Game explores how games, sports, and theater helped shape American democracy during the formative years of the republic. Far from being an escape from everyday life, entertainments such as horse racing, playing cards, and theatergoing became central battlegrounds on which Americans of all backgrounds fought to secure rights, opportunities, and power.

Through dozens of compelling personal stories that draw on a wide range of previously unexamined evidence, Cohen illustrates why entertainment became more contested, or, as people in the period said it, "sporting," over the course of the century from 1760 to 1860. On one hand, harrowing tales of failure and bankruptcy explain why investors and professional performers increasingly catered to the demands of the widest audience possible, even if that diverse array of participants wanted to challenge social boundaries related to class, race, and gender. But on the other hand, the popularity of a sporting culture rife with challenge also helped politicians and businessmen use sporting culture to portray America as being more democratic than it was -- to the point of calling elections "races" and business a "game" in which the "best man won." So, over time, sporting culture evolved into both a breeding ground for assertions of democratic equality that led to Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, and Hamilton, as well as an arena for establishing the power of wealth that continues to resonate in the ranks of owners, producers, and luxury box attendees. Fusing critical and celebratory histories of entertainment, and reorienting those histories to put men like P.T. Barnum at the end rather than the beginning of the process, Cohen shows that -- since the country's birth -- America's political culture has been built as much from the sporting world of racing, theater, and taverns, as from legislation and weighty political theory. At a moment rife with debate about the relationship between politics and entertainment, They Will Have Their Game traces the long history of entertainment's impact on American politics and values.

Winner of the 2018 James Broussard Prize for the Best First Book on American History between the Revolution and the Civil War, awarded by the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenneth Cohen is Curator of American Culture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Review:

"Kenneth Cohen reassesses American politics and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by using sporting culture as a lens through which to view the rise of democracy, capitalism, and cultural notions of respectability, citizenship, self-making, risk-taking, and rough play that became the cornerstones of white American manhood. Undergraduates will warm to the subject matter of They Will Have Their Game and to the historical actors whose triumphs and trials Cohen winningly chronicles."

(Brian Luskey, West Virginia University, author of On the Make)

"Kenneth Cohen reconstructs a lost world of sporting contests―at taverns, race tracks, and theaters―that will be strangely familiar to contemporary readers.  Sports shaped political conflict, he argues, simultaneously negotiating class tensions, defining racial and gender boundaries, and justifying the concentration of wealth and power. They Will Have Their Game brings sports history into the mainstream, offering a fresh and provocative account of the origins and development of democracy in America."

(Peter S. Onuf, Senior Research Fellow, Monticello, and coauthor of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination)

"Kenneth Cohen does far more than simply read sporting culture as a metaphor for American politics. He interrogates how this culture emerged as a means to identify insiders and outsiders in the nation's political landscape."

(Heather Nathans, Tufts University, author of Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501705490
• ISBN 13: 9781501705496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336