Jules Tygiel

The following article is adapted from Jules Tygiel's introduction to Baseball as America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game, a companion volume to the National Baseball Hall of Fame's traveling exhibit of the same name. In it, Tygiel puts the history of professional baseball into the broader context of American history, discussing how baseball served as a symbol of national unification after the Civil War, a symbol of economic and technological progress in the early twentieth century, and a symbol of social progress in the 1940s and 1950s. He also discusses how the rise of mass media increased the game's popularity. Baseball's rich history, Tygiel concludes, has earned it its reputation as the national pastime. Jules Tygiel is a professor of history at San Francisco State University and the author of Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson...