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Robert C. Cottrell was a longtime professor of history and American studies at California State University, Chico. He taught a course for many years on American Popular Culture and offered seminars on baseball and American culture. He is the author of The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant; Blackball, the Black Sox, and the Babe: Baseball’s Crucial 1920 Season; Two Pioneers: How Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball—and America; and The Year Without a World Series: Major League Baseball and the Road to the 1994 Players’ Strike. He lives in California.
Robert Cottrell is a slugger who has hit it out of the park, giving us a book that sets a neglected baseball story in the context of an era of profound political change and social changes. Add team and personal rivalries and you get a compelling story that truly matters. -- Michael D’Antonio, author of Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley, Baseball's Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles After World War II, New York City became the epicenter of major league baseball's renaissance. Robert Cottrell’s riveting account captures its verve and athletic splendor at a time when Mays, Mantle, and Snyder patrolled centerfield and baseball was still the national pastime. But The Heyday is also about baseball confronting its checkered racial past as the nation struggled to realize its democratic ideals. -- Rob Ruck, professor of sports history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL Cottrell provides an eloquent and insightful account of New York City’s three Major League Baseball teams that dominated the sport between 1947 and 1957. Properly focusing on the accomplishments of the team's great center fielders, the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Giants’ Willie Mays, and the Dodgers’ Duke Snider, the book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the allure of baseball for fans in the ‘Emerald City’ during one of the sport’s greatest eras. -- David K. Wiggins, author of More than a Game: A History of the African American Experience in Sport Cottrell entertains readers with a year-by-year look at New York City’s Golden Age of baseball, including fascinating stories of stars, rank-and-file players, and also-rans, penny-pinching owners and executives, team rivalries, and fans' emotional roller-coasters during each season. In this breezily-written but highly informative book, Cottrell reveals how many large-scale changes in the 1950s not only transformed society, but baseball, too. None had as big an influence as the battle for civil rights and racial equality. For some, it may seem like baseball’s age of innocence. But, as Cottrell observes, the Golden Age was a two-edged sword. His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the interlocking fates of baseball and American society. -- Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College and coauthor of Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Workers’ Rights and American Empire With a historian's insight and a fan's heart, Robert C. Cottrell reminds us why baseball of the 1950s is not only the story of a great city at a moment in time but of a nation whose national pastime revealed so much about it meant to be an American. -- Michael Shapiro, author of The Last Good Season and Bottom of the Ninth
