Property:Digger Activity

This is a property of type Text.

Usage127

FilterThe <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" class="external text" href="https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Property_page/Filter">search filter</a> allows the inclusion of <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" class="external text" href="https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Query_expressions">query expressions</a> such as <code>~</code> or <code>!</code>. The selected <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" class="external text" href="https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Query_engine">query engine</a> might also support case insensitive matching or other short expressions like:<ul><li><code>in:</code> result should include the term, e.g. '<code>in:Foo</code>'</li></ul><ul><li><code>not:</code> result should to not include the term, e.g. '<code>not:Bar</code>'</li></ul>

Showing 20 pages using this property.

G

Greg Perkins, December 2008 +

Pre-Civil War town ball in Cincinnati is the subject of an article by Greg Perkins in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article, “The Cincinnati Game: Townball in Cincinnati, 1858-1866,” traces the rise of a distinctive form of town ball (with a hexagonal infield, and with bases 60 feet apart, and with an all-out-side-out rule) before the War. Covington KY fielded 10 townball clubs, and 28 Cincinnati games received newspaper coverage in summer 1858 alone (average score, 155 to 112, most games lasting four innings, average team size of over 12 players). Greg, who majored in history at the University of Cincinnati, is now collecting information on Henry M. Millar, a Cincinnati reporter who traveled with the 1869 Red Stockings and later wrote a memoir of the experience. +

P

Priscilla Astifan, December 2008 +

Priscilla and a colleague discuss the predecessor game to Knicks-style base ball in upstate New York in “Old-Fashioned Base Ball” in Western New York, 1825-1860,” which appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball. The article notes that until 1860 the unusually unnamed earlier game was still played competitively in several places. About 20 news accounts from that time, and from later accounts of a number of “throwback” games, allow a partial picture of the nature of that earlier game. Strong similarity to the Massachusetts Game is found. +

J

John Freyer, January 2008 +

Researcher and author John Freyer reports that his interest is still Chicago-area baseball from back before the National League. Among other feats, he has accumulated every Chicago box score between the years 1859 and the Chicago Fire in 1871. He also enjoys researching New York baseball before the Civil War. John has an ongoing project of bat and ball games over history, from Wicket to Wiffleball, but hasn't determined whether it amounts to a new book. Currently, John is working with others to establish a Chicago Baseball Museum, and serves as the project’s ad hoc historian. +

R

Rob Loeffler, March 2007 +

Rob has assembled a chronology of the evolution of ballmaking. Rob has a collection of photos of well over 200 19th C baseballs and is analyzing them to estimate their size and weight. +

M

Martin Hoerchner, March 2007 +

The UK Chapter of SABR is preparing to resume publication of The Examiner, which has given us several accounts of members’ research on English ballplaying (see <a href="http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html">http://www.sabruk.org/examiner/index.html</a>). Martin, who has uncovered contemporary stoolball and trap ball in the olde country, is leading the renewed effort. +

G

Glenn Drinkwater, January 2008 +

The Vintage Base Ball Association’s [VBBA] recently-installed Glenn as their president. One of Glenn’s objectives is to review the organization’s Rules and Customs program to reinforce historical accuracy. Glenn is in touch with [[Peter Morris]], [[Fred Ivor-Campbell]], and [[Tom Shieber]] as part of that initiative. +

T

Tom Altherr, December 2008 +

Tom has brought to light another big slug of references to early ballplaying. His article in the spring 2008 issue of Base Ball, "Chucking the Old Apple; Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games," resulted in 33 new entries for the Protoball Chronology. Included are references to ballplaying by slaves between 1797 and the 1840s, soldierly play between 1775 and 1815, and numerous accounts of campus ballgames between 1813 and about 1840. +

Tom Altherr, January 2008 +

Tom has revised a paper he presented at NASSH in 2006 (“Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries in Pre-1839 North American Ball Games History”) for possible publication. His 2007 contribution at theCooperstown symposium is based on further research and more theoretical speculations why baseball emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It may appear in the next biennial anthology. After his week in Cooperstown, Tom spent a very solid week researching at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. This has all led him to see a possible book on all pre-1840 North American games – base ball and beyond -- played with a ball. +

C

Craig Waff, January 2008 +

Trained in the history of science, Craig is focusing for now on early ball in New York and Brooklyn, and on games played on ice skates in the mid-1800s. He has been using the online databases of the New York Times and Brooklyn Daily Eagle to not only track the development of interest in astronomy in New York City and Brooklyn in the late 19th century, but also to collect systematically, for the PROTOBALL archives, copies of all baseball-related articles that appeared in these newspapers up to 1860. During that search he discovered what may be the first recorded triple play (occurring on 16 April 1859). He is also researching the winter baseball games played with skates on ice from 1860 to 1887. +

W

Wayne McElreavy, January 2008 +

Wayne is trying to piece together the history of baseball in the Claremont area. +

Wendy Knickerbocker, January 2008 +

Wendy's main baseball research interest is Billy Sunday. However, she is also interested in American cultural history in general, and while doing research on a book about a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she was delighted to find [and to submit for the Protoball chronology] an entry on baseball from Emerson's journals. It was while reading Emerson's journals to get a handle on Emerson’s friendship with (and admiration for) her current research subject, Edward T. Taylor, that she found the June 1840 baseball reference (see Protoball entry [[1840.20]]), which imagines that some young ballplayers feel “a faint sense of being a tyrannical Jupiter driving spheres madly from their orbits. +

M

Mark Schoenberg, April 2013 +

Mark Schoenberg is a new Digger. We are looking for this street-wise New Yorker to curate Protoball’s prospective Schoenberg’s Stickball Collection. +

H

Howard Burman, February 2013 +

[[Howard Burman]] has been trying to figure out the game of Irish Rounders. The game’s players see it as unrelated to English rounders, and possibly as a predecessor to American base ball. Having visited Ireland and gotten to know officials of the Gaelic Athletic Association, his report on the game is imminent, and will be posted to the Protoball site. +

J

John Zinn, February 2013 +

[[John Zinn]] is working on a manuscript telling the early history of base ball in New Jersey. He has examined 47 newspapers’ coverage of base ball club activities from 1855 to 1860, a period when only five NJ cities had daily papers. John has made major contributions to the SABR “Spread of Base Ball” project and to MLB’s Thorn Committee on Origins, which has stimulated new digging on the early spread of the game. John reports that both Newark and Jersey City grew clubs that were mentioned at least once during this six-year span. The most active base ball counties in the state were Hudson County (which includes both Jersey City and Hoboken) and Essex County, the two counties closest to Hoboken's famous Elysian Fields. +

M

Monica Nucciarone, February 2013 +

[[Monica Nucciarone]] is following up on her authoritative book on Alexander Cartwright, has contributed to a forthcoming documentary about 19C baseball in Hawaii, and is writing her second book, on Cartwright’s daughter-in-law, Princess Theresa. +

D

Debbie Shattuck, February 2013 +

[[Debbie Shattuck]] is at work on her book-length dissertation, Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers. She has upcoming talks on women and early base ball in Cleveland, in Madison County, New York, and in St. Louis this year. +

A

Anita Broad, June 2013 +

Anita Broad is also now listed as a digger. Anita has recently written her Master’s thesis, “Stoolball Through the Seasons: It’s Just not Cricket,” and now serves as Research and Education Officer of Stoolball England. She has already helped Protoball sort out what the English safe-haven games Pentoss (a form of ladies’ cricket) and Target Ball were all about. She and her daughter play stoolball, as did her mother and grandmother. She is now working on a grant that funds a primary school education project on the history of stoolball. +

B

Bill Humber, August 2013 +

Bill Humber is working on the story of Canada’s earliest base ball, focusing in partonWilliam Shuttleworth, a key person on an 1854 team. Bill is also continuing to identify the nature of the “Canadian game,” which preceded the arrival of the New York game in Canada. +

Bill Ryczek, June 2013 +

Bill Ryczek has 4 essays on early ballplaying posted at the National Pastime Museum site at <a href="http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/author/william-ryczek/historians-corner">http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/author/william-ryczek/historians-corner</a>. Included are an account of the Excelsiors’ 1860 tour of New York State and an account of the evolution of pitching from the 1850s onward. Access requires you to register for the site, which took just 3 or 4 hours in our recent experience. +

Bruce Allardice, June 2013 +

Bruce Allardice’s paper on the spread of modern base ball in the American south has won a 2013 McFarland Award for the best history or biography for 2012. The article, “The Inauguration of This Noble and Manly Game Among Us,” appeared in Base Ball’s Fall 2012 issue (volume 6, number 2, pages 51-69). Bruce uses extensive newly-found newspaper and other sources to dispel myths about the neglect of base ball by southerners and about the relative importance of northern influences in the spread of modern base ball in the South from 1859 on. One judge wrote: “Here's a very well researched piece that takes on the long-established ‘prison camp’ theory of dissemination. It represents exactly what we are looking for in an award winner; well written, thoughtful, convincing, and one that makes you wonder why this hadn't been proven before. It breaks new ground and should be cited for a long time to come.” +

Property:Digger Activity

Navigation menu

Search