Our present-day American culture is obsessed with sports. To cite just two pieces of evidence of this, on average, more than 67,000 fans attend each National Football League game and more than 30,000 fans attend each Major League Baseball game. This is to say nothing of the millions of fans who watch these sports on television or listen to them on the radio.

When did America become a place filled with sports nuts? When did the business of professional sports become a thing in the United States?

Early American history has answers for us as does Kenneth Cohen, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of They Will Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the American Republic.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/187

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 135: Julie Holcomb, Moral Commerce: The Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy
• Episode 136: Jennifer Van Horn, Material Culture and the Making of America
• Episode 140: Tamara Thornton, Nathaniel Bowditch: 19th-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea
• Episode 144: Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause of the American Revolution

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