Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War

Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War. By George B. Kirsch. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 145. $19.95, ISBN 0-691-05733-8.)

Sport historians have long debated the impact of the Civil War on the game of baseball. The interpretation stated most often is that the war temporarily stunted the growth of baseball but that in the long term the conflict contributed to the growth and popularity of the game that would become the national pastime. George B. Kirsch, expanding on his previous research on early American team sports, carefully and judiciously analyzes the impact of the Civil War on baseball beginning with the immediate prewar years and concluding in the late 1860s.

Kirsch begins by reviewing the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, in which postwar baseball boosters, most notably Albert...