They Will Have Their Game

In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others.

They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.

Kenneth Cohen is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware

The book is gracefully written, and a large number of well-chosen illustrations add to the narrative. They Will Have Their Game has many strengths. Perhaps most impressive is the research, especially in letters and legal records, which captures a level of detail I would not have thought possible.

They Will Have Their Game offers a compelling description of the process by which sporting culture emerged in eastern North America.... political and cultural historians should read it, and they should do so with care.

In this highly readable scholarly work, Cohen offers a descriptive study in power and hierarchy in American society from 1750 to 1860 and the evolving role of 'sporting culture' in their expression. Well-chosen and well-placed reproductions of period artwork illustrate socialization between social groups and the exclusionary divides that increasingly restricted participation by women, black slaves, and freemen.

Peter S. Onuf, Senior Research Fellow, Monticello, and co-author of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination:

Kenneth Cohen reconstructs a lost world of sporting contests—at taverns, race tracks, and theaters—that will be strangely familiar to contemporary readers. Sports shaped political conflict, he argues, simultaneously negotiating class tensions, defining racial and gender boundaries, and justifying the concentration of wealth and power. They Will Have Their Game brings sports history into the mainstream, offering a fresh and provocative account of the origins and development of democracy in America.

Brian Luskey, West Virginia University, author of On the Make:

Kenneth Cohen reassesses American politics and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by using sporting culture as a lens through which to view the rise of democracy, capitalism, and cultural notions of respectability, citizenship, self-making, risk-taking, and rough play that became the cornerstones of white American manhood. Undergraduates will warm to the subject matter of They Will Have Their Game and to the historical actors whose triumphs and trials Cohen winningly chronicles.

Heather Nathans, Tufts University, author of Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861:

Kenneth Cohen does far more than simply read sporting culture as a metaphor for American politics. He interrogates how this culture emerged as a means to identify insiders and outsiders in the nation's political landscape.