Black Baseball Histories and Criticism

Here, browse our expanding bibliography of black baseball history and criticism, organized alphabetically according to the author's last name. Click on each title to be directed to a purchase link.

Ackmann, Martha. Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Chicago Review Press, 2010.  

Aiello, Thomas. The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932. U of Alabama P, 2011. 

Adelson, Bruce. Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South. U of Virginia P, 1999. 

Anderson, Daniel. The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance. McFarland, 2017. 

Ardell, Jean Hastings. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. 

Berlage, Gai Ingham. Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History. Praeger, 1994. 

Bloom, John and Michael Willard, Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture. NYU Press, 2002.  

Branson, Douglas M. Greatness in the Shadows: Larry Doby and the Integration of the American League. U of Nebraska P, 2016. 

Brashler, William. Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues. Harper and Row, 1978. 

Bush, Frederick C. and Bill Nowlin, editors. Bittersweet Goodbye: The Black Barons, the Grays, and the 1948 Negro League World Series. SABR Digitial Library, 2017. 

Candelaria, Cordelia. Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature. Greenwood, 1989. 

Carino, Peter, editor. Baseball, Literature, Culture: Essays, 2004-2005. McFarland, 2006.

Cassuto, Leonard and Stephen Partridge, editors. The Cambridge Companion of Baseball. Cambridge UP, 2011 

Cohen, Marilyn. No Girls in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball. McFarland, 2009. 

Cottrell, Robert Charles. The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant. New York UP, 2004. 

Dixon, Phil. Andrew ''Rube'' Foster, A Harvest on Freedom's Fields. Xlibris, 2010. 

---. John "Buck" O'Neil: The Rookie, The Man, The Legacy 1938. AuthorHouse, 2009. 

---. The Negro Baseball Leagues: A Photographic History. Amereon, 1992. 

---.Phil Dixon's American Baseball Chronicles Great Teams: The 1931 Homestead Grays Volume I. Xlibris, 2009. 

---. Wilber "Bullet" Rogan and the Kansas City Monarchs. McFarland, 2010. 

Early, Gerald. A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports. Harvard UP, 2011. 

---. “Why Baseball Was the Black National Pastime.” Basketball Jones: America 

Above the Rim. Ed. Todd Boyd and Kenneth L. Shropshire. New York: NYU P, 2000. 

Elias, Robert, editor. Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender, and the National Pastime. M. E. Sharpe, 2001 

Freedman, Lew. African American Pioneers of Baseball: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Greenwood, 2007. 

Fussman, Cal. After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes: An Oral History. ESPN, 2007. 

Goffman, Ethan. Imagining Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Contemporary American Literature. SUNY P, 2000. 

Hauser, Christopher. The Negro Leagues Chronology. McFarland, 2006. 

Heaphy, Leslie, editor. Black Baseball in Chicago: Essays on the Players, Teams and Games. McFarland, 2006. 

---. The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960. McFarland, 2003.

---. editor, Satchel Paige and Company: Essays on the Kansas City Monarchs, Their Greatest Star and the Negro Leagues. McFarland, 2007.

Hogan, Lawrence D. Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball. National Geographic Society, 2006. 

Holway, John. The Complete Book of Baseball's Negro Leagues: The Other Half of Baseball History. Hastings House, 2001. 

---. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. 1975. Da Capo, 1992.  

Kang, Jay Caspian. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Baseball.” New York Times, 16 Apr. 2016, 

 http://www.nytimes.com/ Goffman 2016/04/10/magazine/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-  baseball.html. 

Kelly, Brent. Voices from the Negro Leagues: Conversations with 52 Standouts of the Period 1924-1960. McFarland, 1998.

Klein, Alan. Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream. Yale UP, 1993. 

Koprince, Susan. “Baseball as History and Myth in August Wilson’s Fences.” African American 

Review 40.2 (2006): 349-58. 

Kyle, Donald G. and Robert B. Fairbanks, editors. Baseball in America and America in Baseball. U of Texas at Arlington P, 2008 

Lanctot, Neil. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.  

Lester, Larry. Baseball's First Colored World Series: The 1924 Meeting of the Hilldale Giants and Kansas City Monarchs. McFarland, 2014.

---. Black Baseball's National Showcase: The East-West All-Star Game, 1933-1953. Bison Books, 2002. 

---. Rube Foster in His Time. McFarland, 2012. 

Letzler, David. “Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology of ‘Going Down Swinging.’” African American Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2014. 301-12. 

Luke, Bob. The Baltimore Elite Giants: Sport and Society in the Age of Negro League Baseball. Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. 

---. The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues. Potomac, 2011. 

Lutze, Mitch. The Page Fence Giants: A History of Black Baseball's Pioneering Champions. McFarland, 2018. 

Mars, Ken. The 1887 National Colored League Resource Guide. 2017.

Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. Columbia UP, 1990. 

Morris, Timothy. Making the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction. U of Illinois P, 1997.  

Nathan, Daniel A. “Bearing Witness to Blackball: Buck O’Neil, the Negro Leagues, and the Politics of the Past.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2001, pp. 453-469. 

Lomax, Michael E., editor. Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in the Era of Change. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 

---. Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902–1931: The Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues. Syracuse UP, 2014. 

Miller, R Baxter. "Traces of Sport from the Harlem Renaissance: The Embedded Narrative." CLA Journal 59.2 (2015): 131-145. 

Moffi, Larry and Jonathan Kronstadt. Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers, 1947-1959. U of Iowa P, 1994. 

Newman, Roberta J. and Joel Nathan Rosen. Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar. U of Mississippi, 2014. 

Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African American Odyssey. U of Illinois P, 1995. 

Peterson, Richard. Extra Innings: Writing on Baseball. U of Illinois P, 2001.

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Players and All-Black Professional Teams. 1970. Oxford UP, 1992. 

Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. Knopf, 1997. 

Reisler, Jim, editor. Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles from Black Sportswriters Who Covered the Negro Leagues. McFarland, 2007.

Ritter, Lawrence. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. William Morrow, 1984. 

Rhoden, William C. Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. Crown, 2006. 

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues. U of Nebraska P, 2007. 

Ribowsky, Mark. Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson in the Shadows of the Game. Simon and Schuster, 1996. 

Riley, James A. The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. Carroll & Graf, 1994. 

---. Of Monarchs and Black Barons: Essays on Baseball's Negro Leagues. McFarland, 2012. 

Roudané, Matthew. “Safe at Home? August Wilson’s Fences.” The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 135-44. 

Ruck, Rob. Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh. U of Illinois P,1993. 

---. Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game. Beacon Press: 2011.

---. Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. 1991. Bison Books, 1999. 

Rutter, Emily R.  “Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack and the Tradition of Black Baseball Literature.” MELUS 42.1 (2017): 74-93. 

---. Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line. UP of Mississippi, 2018. 

---.  “‘Isolated Togetherness’: Archival Performances in Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball.” Studies in American Culture 38.1 (2015): 7-21.

---. “‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’: A Contrafactual Reading of Percival Everett’s Suder and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.” Aethlon 32.1 (2017): 43-57.

Shannon, Sandra. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Howard UP, 1995.

Stewart, Anthony. “‘Do you mind if we make Craig Suder white?’: From Stereotype to Cosmopolitan to Grotesque in Percival Everett’s Suder.” Perspectives on Percival Everett. Ed. Keith B. Mitchell and Robin G. Vander. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2013. 113-125. 

Sullivan, Kathleen. Women Characters in Baseball Literature: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2005. 

Swanson, Ryan A. When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime. U of Nebraska P, 2014. 

Tettleton, Matthew S. "Lunch Pails and Thugs: The Richard Sherman Saga, Sport Literature, and the Racial Discourse of American Sports." Aethlon 30.1 (2014): 47-61.

Tygiel, Jules. Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History. U of Nebraska P, 2002. 

---. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Oxford UP, 2008. 

Tye, Larry. Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Random House, 2010. 

Umphlett, Wiley Lee. “The Black Man as Fictional Athlete: Runner Mack, the Sporting Myth, 

and the Failure of the American Dream.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 33.1 (1987): 73-83. style=�e ^o x

Weixlmann, Joe.  “The Dream Turned ‘Daymare’: Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack.” MELUS 8.4 (1981): 93-

103. 

Westbrook, Deeanne. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. U of Illinois P, 1996.  

Whitt, Margaret. “Bailey’s Café as Sports Bar, or, Why Baseball Needs a Way Station.” Callaloo 23 4 (2000): 1464-1474.

Wiggins, David K. Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African Americans. U of Arkansas P, 2006. 

Williams, Andrea. Baseball's Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues. Macmillan, 2021. 

Zang, David W. Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer. U of Nebraska P, 1995. 

Zirin, Dave. What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States. Haymarket, 2005.