Kenneth Cohen. They Will Have Their Game

Decades ago, several of us turned our scholarly attention to theaters, racetracks, taverns, and gambling halls, thinking popular venues like these might contain clues to persistent patterns in American culture and politics. Studied closely, the behavior of theater audiences, tavern patrons, and racing fans could reveal the strains of class, race, and gender that shaped lives in the early American republic. The rough white masculinity of the sporting world was rife with contests over the meaning of equality, virility, gentility, honor, risk, respectability, and refinement and seemed to offer commentary on the tumultuous racial politics and unstable economic life of the new nation. Drinkers toasted their political allegiance; theatergoers acted their class alliances; and gamblers played with the risks of a capitalist economy. Kenneth Cohen, curator of American culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, has returned to these materials with some new questions in mind. In They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic, Cohen brings his schooling in business history and the history of capitalism to the sporting world and comes back with surprising stories of the changing financial structures that shaped sport and the business of sport. The book’s arguments grow from Cohen’s work in archives that include tax records, city directories, advertisements, diaries, insurance maps, and probate files. We learn the price of a billiard table, the profits of a theatrical tour, the purse of a horse race, and the rising stud fees for a winning thoroughbred. But Cohen also uses his extensive reading in recent scholarship on cultural and economic history of the United States to tie his remarkable archival research to tensions and contradictions of American politics and to explore the subtle workings of persistent inequalities in a supposedly egalitarian sporting culture.

Allegiance · Culture of the United States · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation) · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Sports, Gender, and Society