History 490/English 525
Tygiel/Solomon
Spring, 2007

 

QUESTIONS FOR SECOND PAPER

 

Choose one of the following questions and write a 4-6 page (1000-1700 word) paper in answer to it. You may answer either a question drawn from the history list, or one drawn from the literature list regardless of which section you are enrolled in. All papers must be word-processed, double-spaced, WITH A LARGE12 POINT FONT and written in the best possible English that you can muster. Papers should include pagination and a word count. Follow the guidelines provided in the handout, "Writing Papers." Your answers should be drawn from the readings and lectures. MAKE SURE THAT YOU USE ALL OF THE READINGS PERTINENT TO THE QUESTION, MAKING SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO THE AUTHORS. PAPERS ARE DUE WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18.

 

HISTORY TOPICS

1. Discuss the role of the baseball commissioner during the Kenesaw Mountain Landis years.  How did Landis deal with the issues of gambling, night baseball, the minor leagues, and racial integration.
 

2. Roy Campanella once stated, "A Negro ballplayer playing Negro ball in the United States might not have lived like a king, but he didn't live bad either." Discuss the positive and negative elements of the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, and other Jim Crow venues as described in the course readings and online materials.  What were the inconsistencies in baseball's color line?

3.  What were the major changes affecting baseball on and off the field in the 1920s and the 1930s?

 

ENGLISH TOPICS (0THER SIDE)

 

 

 

Use as a source or reference aspects of the books by Harris and Hano.  I recommend treating two works, but you know best how to accomplish a brilliant short essay: clear, concrete, concise, elegantly written and compulsively proofread and corrected. You may, of course, agree or disagree with any of the statements.

1) Apply any of the appropriate questions from the Paper #1 list to the above.

2)  "The novel form seems to demand the addition of a mythic or magic or historic or fantasy dimension to baseball; the memoir can be more personal." Discuss.

3) "Although baseball consists of winning or losing, baseball fiction seems to concentrate on loss." Discuss.

4) If Barzun is correct in asserting that to understand America, one must know baseball, can we say the same for baseball as social history or personal memoir?

5)  "Most characterizations in baseball novels are simplified and stereotyped rather than profound and unusual."  Discuss.

6) "Statistics and records are crucial both to baseball as game and as novel."  Discuss.

7) "Baseball novels tend to parody the game rather than to describe it."  Discuss, but be careful.

8) "Baseball novels show a creative tension between characterizations of individual players and descriptions of games/seasons." Discuss.

9)   Your own topic, with the approval of Professor Solomon.