UI Press | Daniel A. Nathan | Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal

Saying It's So

A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal

Awards and Recognition:

Winner of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Book Award, 2003. Winner of the North American Society for Sport History Book Award, 2003. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006. Named Book of the Year by both the North American Society for Sport History and the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

How meaning was manufactured following the national pastime's darkest hour

The story of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds has lingered in our collective consciousness for more than eighty years. Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans. Saying It's So offers a series of astute reflections on what these different cultural narratives reveal about their creators and the eras in which they were created, producing a complex study of cultural values, memory, and the ways people make meaning.

A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts

"Saying It's So is ambitious in its reach, well researched, and clearly written. The range of texts it considers is impressive and important, and its readings of individual texts are invariably engaging."--Michael Oriard, author of Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Literature

Daniel A. Nathan is an assistant professor of American Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He has also taught at Miami University and the University of Tampere, Finland, where he was a Fulbright Professor of North American Studies.