By Gwendolyn Lockman The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to […]
Medieval Facial Hair in Major League Baseball
by Guy Raffa What is it with baseball players and whiskers? The 2013 Red Sox perfected the art of beard-bonding on the way to their third World Series championship in ten years. Boston players and their fans rallied around what Christopher Oldstone-Moore calls the “quest beard” in his history of facial hair, Of Beards and […]
Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro Leagues
Edward Shore pays tribute to Austinite and Negro Leagues legend Willie “El Diablo” Wells and reflects on the enduring legacies of racism in the National Pastime.
42 (2013)
The new film 42 tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s heroic effort to integrate Major League Baseball.
Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel (1997)
Historian Jules Tygiel presents not only an account of Jackie Robinson’s heroic struggle to integrate Major League Baseball, but a larger history of links between African American history, baseball, and the modern civil rights movement. Baseball’s Great Experiment further raises questions about race and sports in our current day.
Film Review – Baseball by the Numbers: Moneyball (2011)
Although its subject is one of the more interesting moments in recent sports history, Moneyball offers surprisingly little of that history.