The Story of the Baltimore Black Sox and the 1929 American Negro League Pennant

FAIN: FB-51699-05

Daniel A. Nathan
Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-1698)

My project is a history of the Baltimore Black Sox and its 1929 pennant-winning season. Although interest in Negro league baseball has steadily increased for the last thirty years, teams like the Black Sox have largely faded from memory and been ignored by history. This project, a microhistory and a meditation on cultural memory and our ability to know the past, retells the stories of forgotten men who were simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. It uses a specific event to illustrate and reflect on African-American cultural history, local race relations, politics, business practices, and social life, and the ways in which the past can be reconstructed.