Baseball: The American Story

Baseball is more than a game—it is a window into the history, culture, conflicts, and aspirations of the United States. Baseball: The American Story is a three-day teacher professional development seminar that uses America’s national pastime to explore the broader American experience and the ways baseball has both reflected and shaped the nation.

Led by Mitch Nathanson of Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law, the seminar will draw particularly upon themes developed in his A People’s History of Baseball and Under Jackie’s Shadow. Participants will examine baseball from the perspective of the people who played, watched, followed, and transformed the game, exploring its connections to immigration, race and segregation, integration, labor, class, ethnicity, urban life, mass media, and the changing meaning of the American Dream.

The seminar will also consider the ballpark as a distinctive American civic space. At a moment of intense political polarization, baseball games remain places where Americans of different political, racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds gather around a shared ritual and common set of rules. Why has the ballpark remained comparatively resistant to the political sorting that increasingly characterizes other areas of American life? What happens when politics enters that space? And what might baseball teach us about the institutions, traditions, and shared experiences that sustain a pluralistic society?

These questions will come alive through a visit and behind-the-scenes tour of the Philadelphia Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, connecting the history and culture of the national pastime to the experience of the contemporary ballpark.

Ultimately, teachers will discover how the history of baseball provides an unusually accessible lens for examining America itself—its divisions, its transformations, and the experiences that continue to bring Americans together.