In Patriotic Games, historian Stephen Pope explores the ways sport was transformed from a mere amusement into a metaphor for American life. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, sport became the most pervasive popular cultural activity in American society. During these years, basketball was invented, football became a mass spectator event, and baseball soared to its status as the "national pasttime." Pope demonstrates how America's sporting tradition emerged from a society fractured along class, race, ethnic, and gender lines. Institutionalized sport became a trans- class mechanism for packaging...

Choice Outstanding Academic Book (1998)
Nationalism and amateurism. While countless scholars have written on one or the other of these two important concepts, S.W. Pope has undertaken to explore the relationship between them. His subtle analysis on this relationship is but one of many highlights in this wonderfully insightful and multi-faceted book. -Allen Guttmann, Amherst College
Pope has done a masterful job of combining his reading from secondary sources with his own original research to give us a definitive account of the time when sports and national identity came to be...