American Studies Faculty Publish New Books

Two members of the American studies faculty have published new books on different aspects of American history and culture.

Daniel Nathan, assistant professor of American studies, is the author of Saying It’s So – A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (2002, University of Illinois Press), and Gregory Pfitzer, professor and chair of the department, has written Picturing the Past – Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840-1900 (2002, Smithsonian Institution Press).

Nathan’s topic – the story of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series — is less about the scandal itself and more concerned with how the story has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans.

Addressing the relationship between cultural narratives and social reality, Nathan considers the media’s coverage of the scandal – from front-page attention to scathing commentaries and cartoons – when the story broke in 1920 and in the years that followed. To shed light on the ways cultural and historical meaning are produced, Nathan reflects on a number of well-known baseball references: Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural, Ken Burns’s TV documentary Baseball, the baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa, built for the film Field of Dreams. He also considers the country’s reaction to the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike.

The book is a volume in the Sport and Society series.

Greg Pfitzer takes a detailed look into the visual culture of the past by examining the often maligned illustrated history books produced in the 19th century.

Around 1840, changes in publishing techniques allowed visual images to be reproduced inexpensively for the first time. This enabled established artists, who often had no training in history, to present their own patriotic interpretations of historical events. Authors began to write their texts with these images in mind – leading to the development of a dramatic, often melodramatic, pictorial genre that had an enormous effect on the kind and the intensity of history available to Americans.

Pfitzer finds that these books were directed at not only semiliterate immigrants but also middle-class Americans seeking to reaffirm their patriotism. Many books contained sentimental – even comic – misrepresentations of history, but some authors and artists showed sparks of genius in the way they condensed the past and made it comprehensible.

By the 1890s a new breed of professional historian was expressing deep concern about the “deverbalization” of culture brought on by illustrated histories. Suspicions about the reliability of visual evidence – including photographs – called into question the relevancy of visual literacy. At the turn of the century, the heyday of the illustrated history book was over.

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