"Why did cricket, proclaimed by some antebellum observers as America's future national pastime, fail to live up to these prognostications, and maintain even a nominal place in American culture?" "This book attempts to answer this question, one of the most baffling, yet important, in the field of sports history. Based upon a thorough research of contemporary sources, from the colonial era up to the First World War, the author examines cricket's rise as an organized sport before the Civil War, its cultural rivalry with baseball during Reconstruction, and its attempt to find a niche as an alternative sport during the post-Reconstruction period. Cricket's role as a 19th-century school, college, and working-class sport is also analyzed, as well as its role in the sporting life of America's Victorian "underclass": women and minorities. From this research the author argues, as an alternative to widely accepted theories, that cricket failed as an American sport because it never established an American identity." "Far more than a simple history of a now long-forgotten American sports tradition, this work is a story of the historical development of the American sporting character itself."--Jacket.