Tom Altherr Dedication
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The Protoball Chronology, covering nearly 2000 points in the evolution of baseball and other baserunning games, is dedicated to Tom Altherr.
Tom Altherr's work on early ballplaying played a big part in Protoball's decision to launch an open-ended account of accumulated evidence on the origins of base ball. Protoball was conceived in a period when several academic writers had written recent books on the earliest days of ballplaying. We newcomers had the impression that everything findable had already surely been dug up.
Tom personally disproved that impression. He set forth to find additional early references, and brought many more to light. We judge that about 150 of Protoball's chronology entries came from Tom. And he found a lot of them the old way . . . not by surfing the web at a comfy desk; but by visiting sub-basement document collections far and wide. Tom's own search was not limited to base ball and its predecessor baserunning games -- there are a lot of ballgames that resemble field hockey, hand-ball, etc. But Tom's lode gave us newcomers fresh data, and inspired our own digging, much of it taken from online sources.
Some of Tom's major contributions:
[] Altherr, Thomas (2000) "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic." Nine. 8(2): 15-49.
[] Altherr, Thomas (2008) "Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games." Base Ball. 2(1): 29-43.
[] Altherr, Thomas (1999) "There is Nothing Now Heard of, in our Leisure Hours, But Ball, Ball, Ball." Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1999. McFarland and Company: 187 - 213.
[] Altherr, Thomas (2009) "Base is Not Always Baseball: Prisoner's base from the 13th to 20th Centuries." Base Ball. 3(1): 67-79.
[] Altherr, Thomas (2011) "1850 -- Southern Ball-Games." Base Ball. 5(1): 103 - 105.