With the rise of stars such as Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and now Daisuke Matsuzaka, fans today can easily name players from the island country of Japan. Less widely known is that baseball has long been played on other Pacific islands, in pre-statehood Hawaii, for instance, and in Guam, Samoa and the Philippines. For the multiethnic peoples of these U.S. possessions, the learning of baseball was actively encouraged, some would argue as a means to an unabashedly colonialist end.As early as the deadball era, Pacific Islanders competed against each other and against mainlanders on the diamond,...

Crossing Sidelines, Crossing Cultures crosses disciplines in order to examine an unexplored facet of American racial and ethnic experiences-Asian Pacific American participation in sports. Joel S. Franks examines the experiences of famous and not so famous Asian Pacific American athletes from the late 1800s to the present. Through the stories of athletes such as swimmer Duke Kahanamoku and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, Franks demonstrates how Asian Pacific Americans have overcome discrimination and stereotypes to cross the cultural barriers that separate them from other American racial and...

This book chronicles the Hawaiian Travelers, a barnstorming baseball team of multiethnic, multiracial Hawaiians, who played across the continental continent from 1912 through 1916. This team took on college, semi-professional, minor league, and African American nines. In the process, they won the majority of these games, while subverting venerable racial conventions. It also describes the experiences of some of these players after 1916 as they sought baseball careers on the East Coast of the U.S. mainland. Significantly, this book will shed light on a generally untold story about baseball,...