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The Farmers' Game: Baseball in Rural America. By David Vaught. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 214. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-0755-5.)
David Vaught's The Farmers' Game: Baseball in Rural America has a lot more to say about farmers than about the baseball they played. For American farmers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, baseball filled the fleetingly brief daylight after work in the vanishing summer weeks before the harvest. In this crisp volume, Vaught offers an absorbing history of American agriculture set within the diamond frame of America's pastime.
For the last half century, academic historians have labored hard to correct the misplaced notion that baseball was bom in pastures and nurtured in bams. But Vaught insists they have gone too far; if baseball was not the definitively rural sport of legend, neither was it the preserve of stick-wielding city kids. In a series of historical vignettes, Vaught plows his way through...