TY - BOOK ID - 80838915 TI - They will have their game PY - 2017 SN - 9781501714214 150171421X 9781501714207 1501714201 9781501705496 1501705490 9781501705496 1501752006 9781501752001 PB - Ithaca DB - UniCat KW - Popular culture KW - Sports KW - Culture, Popular KW - Mass culture KW - Pop culture KW - Popular arts KW - Communication KW - Intellectual life KW - Mass society KW - Recreation KW - Culture KW - Field sports KW - Pastimes KW - Recreations KW - Athletics KW - Games KW - Outdoor life KW - Physical education and training KW - History KW - Social aspects KW - United States KW - Civilization KW - Politicized entertainment, early america, theater history, business history, political and economic power of wealth,. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:80838915 AB - In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others.They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." Compelling narratives about individual participants illustrate the processes by which challenge and conflict across class, race, and gender lines produced a sporting culture that continued to grant unique freedoms to a wide range of society even as it also provided a basis for the normalization of systematic inequality. The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history. ER -