Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Miller, Wilbur R | yomes, Nancy | Barnhart, Michael | Nutter, Kathleen.
Date
2016-12-01
Keywords
American history | baseball, broadcasting, masculinity, media, newspapers
Department
Department of History
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77714
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Baseball and the media have been linked throughout the American national pastime’s history. Its rise as a professional game coincided with the Circulation Wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who used sports as one means of selling newspapers. The expansion of radio programming linked listeners across the nation, and made Babe Ruth one of the first national celebrities. Baseball likewise helped fill airspace in the early days of television, and allowed viewers unable (or unwilling) to attend a ballpark the opportunity to see players like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays perform. This dissertation examines the role of the media in promoting baseball and baseball players during the early years of the Cold War, 1945-1962. Print and broadcast media were essential to establishing and maintaining Major League Baseball’s reputation as the “American national pastime,†and in the process, established standards for evaluating players’ skills and behavior. These standards aligned with the dominant values of white, middle-class America, and gendered expectations of athletes. I analyze the different ways in which journalists and broadcasters approached baseball reporting and the ways in which the construction of the game story helped to build ballplayers’ reputations. Although these reputations fell into a series of archetypes, they revealed cultural arbiters’ criteria for “proper masculine behavior†in an era in which “American character†was scrutinized, debated, and defined. | 214 pages
Recommended Citation
O'Connell Gennari, Elizabeth, "Words That Make the Man: Major League Baseball, the Media, and American Manhood, 1945-1962" (2016). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3504.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3504