The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America

Rating:
Summary: Slow Pitch
Review: Sports histories fall into two categories: fans' histories - replete with memorable games, famous players, rules changes, league standings, and team and individual records - and academics' histories, which brush aside those matters in favor of sociology, cultural analysis and politics. While Tom Melville is a cricket fan (author of a proselytizing primer, "Cricket for Americans"), he writes here as an academic, with chapter titles like, "The Retreat from Cosmopolitanism and the Fallacy of the Chadwick Thesis". The upshot is a thoroughly researched volume that concentrates almost exclusively on what Americans thought about cricket and why they did (or more often did not) take it up.

The main subject of "The Tented Field" is cricket's unsuccessful rivalry with baseball. The older sport had solid foundations in pre-Civil War America but progressively gave way to its younger cousin. Mr. Melville traces the peaks and valleys of cricket's popularity from the 1830's, when organized play first appeared, through the first decade of the 20th century, when a final upswing failed to take hold. He has much to say about who played cricket, and when and where and why. How they played and what they did scarcely enters the picture. Save for an occasional brief anecdote and several reproductions of photographs and engravings, cricket itself is all but invisible throughout the work. As a small instance, Mr. Melville has unearthed the box score (to use the baseball term) of a famous 1845 match, legendarily the first in which native Americans held their own against immigrants from England. He uses this evidence to probe the ethnic makeup of the sides but neither reprints it nor tells us what happened on the field.

The author cannot, of course, be blamed for having chosen not to write fans' history, but anyone who picks this volume up under the delusion that he will find accounts of the exploits of American cricketers should be forewarned. The academic delver into sports history will find better rewards. The research is prodigious. One quakes at the thought of how many yellowing newspapers and forgotten magazines Mr. Melville had to turn over to compile his 57 page list of American cricket clubs. On the other hand, the conclusions drawn from this mass of material are a bit confused. The summary statements in the final chapter are difficult to relate to what has gone before, and the ultimate verdict, "Cricket failed in America because it never established an American character", sounds less like an answer than a restatement of the question.

"The Tented Field" contains abundant raw materials for a history of cricket in the United States, but that history, from the point of view of either fan or academic, has yet to be written.

Rating:
Summary: Slow Pitch
Review: Sports histories fall into two categories: fans' histories - replete with memorable games, famous players, rules changes, league standings, and team and individual records - and academics' histories, which brush aside those matters in favor of sociology, cultural analysis and politics. While Tom Melville is a cricket fan (author of a proselytizing primer, "Cricket for Americans"), he writes here as an academic, with chapter titles like, "The Retreat from Cosmopolitanism and the Fallacy of the Chadwick Thesis". The upshot is a thoroughly researched volume that concentrates almost exclusively on what Americans thought about cricket and why they did (or more often did not) take it up.

The main subject of "The Tented Field" is cricket's unsuccessful rivalry with baseball. The older sport had solid foundations in pre-Civil War America but progressively gave way to its younger cousin. Mr. Melville traces the peaks and valleys of cricket's popularity from the 1830's, when organized play first appeared, through the first decade of the 20th century, when a final upswing failed to take hold. He has much to say about who played cricket, and when and where and why. How they played and what they did scarcely enters the picture. Save for an occasional brief anecdote and several reproductions of photographs and engravings, cricket itself is all but invisible throughout the work. As a small instance, Mr. Melville has unearthed the box score (to use the baseball term) of a famous 1845 match, legendarily the first in which native Americans held their own against immigrants from England. He uses this evidence to probe the ethnic makeup of the sides but neither reprints it nor tells us what happened on the field.

The author cannot, of course, be blamed for having chosen not to write fans' history, but anyone who picks this volume up under the delusion that he will find accounts of the exploits of American cricketers should be forewarned. The academic delver into sports history will find better rewards. The research is prodigious. One quakes at the thought of how many yellowing newspapers and forgotten magazines Mr. Melville had to turn over to compile his 57 page list of American cricket clubs. On the other hand, the conclusions drawn from this mass of material are a bit confused. The summary statements in the final chapter are difficult to relate to what has gone before, and the ultimate verdict, "Cricket failed in America because it never established an American character", sounds less like an answer than a restatement of the question.

"The Tented Field" contains abundant raw materials for a history of cricket in the United States, but that history, from the point of view of either fan or academic, has yet to be written.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: This is a superb book, one of the best, if not the best, historical treatments of cricket ever written. Anyone trying to promote cricket in America had better read this.

Rating:
Summary: A ground breaking history book.
Review: This is an excellent book. Not a rah-rah, scores and biography history, but an attempt to explain why cricket failed as an American sport. Readers will be amazed to learn how extensively cricket once was played in the United States (the author includes a state by state, city by city listing of 19th century American cricket clubs from around the country). This book isn't light reading, but worthwhile for anyone who wants to know how America's sporting culture developed