For a variety of reasons, the 1908 American League pennant race has received much less attention from baseball historians than what happened in the National League that year. Yet the AL's race, involving the league's four westernmost teams, was equally dramatic; with only five games left in the season, all four still had a chance to win the pennant. It was the height of what came to be called the "deal ball era," marked by spectacular pitching and mostly low-scoring, quickly played games, and featuring an abundance of colorful characters and controversial, often bizarre, episodes. It was also a time when professional baseball truly came into its own as America's "National Pastime."

In 1910 auto magnate Hugh Chalmers offered an automobile to the baseball player with the highest batting average that season. What followed was a batting race unlike any before or since, between the greatest but most despised hitter, Detroit’s Ty Cobb, and the American League’s first superstar, Cleveland’s popular Napoleon Lajoie. The Chalmers Race captures the excitement of this strange contest—one that has yet to be resolved.                The race came down to the last game of the season, igniting more interest among fans than the World Series and becoming a national obsession. Rick Huhn re-creates the drama that ensued when Cobb, thinking the prize safely his, skipped the last two games, and Lajoie suspiciously had eight hits in a doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns. Although initial counts favored Lajoie, American League president Ban Johnson, the sport’s last word, announced Cobb the winner, and amid the controversy both players received cars. The Chalmers Race details a story of dubious scorekeeping and statistical systems, of performances and personalities in conflict, of accurate results coming in seventy years too late, and of a contest settled not by play on the field but by human foibles.                

Ty Cobb was one of the most famous baseball players who every lived. The author puts Cobb into the context of his times, describing the very different game on the field then, and successfully probes Cobb's complex personality.

Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, V6, No. 1, August, 1962.

This is a study of a disturbing phenomenon in American society -- the Ku Klux Klan -- and that eruption of nativism, racism and moral authoritarianism during the 1920s in the four states of the Southwest -- Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas -- in which the Klan became especially powerful. The hooded order is viewed here as a move by frustrated Americans, through anonymous acts of terror and violence, and later through politics), to halt a changing social order and restore familiar orthodox traditions of morality. Entering the Southwest during the post-World War I period of discontent and disillusion, the Klan spread rapidly over the region and by 1922 its tens of thousands of members had made it a potent force in politics. Charles C. Alexander finds that the Klan in the Southwest, however, functioned more as vigilantes in meting extra-legal punishment to those it deemed moral offenders than as advocates of race and religious prejudice. But the vigilante hysteria vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared; opposition to its terrorist excesses and its secret politics led to its decline after 1924, when the Klan failed abysmally in most of its political efforts. Especially significant here are the analysis of attitudes which led to this revival of the Klan and the close examination of its internal machinations.

Alexander sees the characteristic feature of the Eisenhower era as an effort to "hold the line" against Communism, against big government, against intellectual challenge, against disruptive social change. The period 1952-1961 is examined in trenchant detail by the author, who focuses on domestic politics and foreign policy but also examines economic, social, intellectual, and cultural aspects of the period. He scrutinizes such features of the fifties as McCarthyism, the Korean conflict, Dulles's system of global alliances, the early involvement in Vietnam, the economic boom, the appearance of giant conglomerates, the emergence of Black protest, the gathering crisis of the cities, and the impact of the mass media on popular culture. This book is lively enough for general readers and students of American history since the Second World War, yet probing and scholarly enough to interest specialists."

At the dawn of the roaring twenties, baseball was struggling to overcome two of its darkest moments: the death of a player during a Major League game and the revelations of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. At this critical juncture for baseball, two teams emerged to fight for the future of the game. They were also battling for the hearts and minds of New Yorkers as the city rose in dramatic fashion to the pinnacle of the baseball world. "1921" captures this crucial moment in the history of baseball, telling the story of a season that pitted the New York Yankees against their Polo Grounds landlords and hated rivals, John McGraw's Giants, in the first all-New York Series and resulted in the first American League pennant for the now-storied Yankees' franchise. Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg recreate the drama that featured the charismatic Babe Ruth in his assault on baseball records in the face of McGraw's disdain for the American League and the Ruth-led slugging style. Their work evokes the early 1920s with the words of renowned sportswriters such as Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, and Heywood Broun. With more than fifty photographs, the book offers a remarkably vivid picture of the colorful characters, the crosstown rivalry, and the incomparable performances that made this season a classic.

"He ate gunpowder every morning," complained one umpire, "and washed it down with warm blood." That described John McGraw, who in the 1890s was the rowdiest member of the ferocious Baltimore Orioles, the club that pioneered the hit-and-run, the cutoff, the squeeze play, and the "Baltimore chop." In 1902 he began his thirty-season reign as manager of the Giants, winning ten pennants--a record matched only by Casey Stengel. His career in baseball spanned forty years and two eras--from the game's raucous early days to its emergence as big business.Charles C. Alexander, a professor of history at Ohio University, Athens, and the author of "Ty Cobb," calls John McGraw "perhaps the single most significant figure in baseball's history before Babe Ruth transformed the game with his mammoth home runs and unparalleled showmanship."

Highly successful in knitting together this story of the life of a most remarkable and dedicated player - perhaps the most spirited baseball player ever to have graced the diamond. - Library Journal. "I find little comfort in the popular picture of Cob