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- Title
Basepaths and Baselines The Agricultural and Surveying Contexts of the Emergence of Baseball.
- Authors
Altherr, Thomas L.
- Abstract
The emergence of baseball in the late 18th and early 19th centuries took place during an interesting transitional period. In the northeast, the Industrial Revolution was widening, even though most of the citizenry was rural and agricultural in livelihood and outlook. Several historians, most notably John Demos, have detected a switch from circular life patterns and cultural rituals to ones of linearity and rectangularity. These baseball and baseball-type games did not develop in a vacuum. Even later in urban contexts, these games showed the residue of agricultural influence in the equipment and playing fields. Similarly the move to a more geometrically regular field may have owed something to the importance of surveying and its methods during the same decades. Baseball may have served as a bridge or resolution of the transition from agricultural, pre-industrial circularity to industrial linearity.
- Subjects
UNITED States; HISTORY of baseball; INDUSTRIALIZATION; SURVEYING (Engineering); BASEBALL fields; COUNTRY life; WOODWORK; BASEBALLS; SPORTING goods design &; construction
- Publication
Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, 2011, Vol 5, Issue 2, p63
- ISSN
1934-2802
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3172/BB.5.2.63