Just not cricket: Baseball, youth and national identity in late nineteenth-century children's magazines.

This article examines how late nineteenth-century American children's magazines aimed at the nation's elite played a significant role in shaping baseball as a symbol of national identity, childhood, and social values during the Gilded Age. Through poems, stories, editorials, and readers' letters, these magazines promoted baseball as a manly, patriotic, and scientifically approached sport suited to white, Protestant, upper-middle-class boys, while often excluding or marginalizing girls, Black children, and working-class youth. The coverage reflected tensions around professionalism, morality, and class, and positioned baseball as a distinctly American pastime in contrast to cricket, yet also acknowledged transatlantic cultural connections. Ultimately, these periodicals contributed to embedding baseball within American exceptionalism and social norms, revealing both the sport's cultural significance and the social boundaries of its imagined participants.