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Illuminates the ways games—from baseball cards to board games, charades to boxing, and croquet to strategies of war—were integral to nineteenth-century life and culture in the United States and Britain.
A vital part of daily life in the nineteenth century, games and play were so familiar and so ubiquitous that their presence over time became almost invisible. Technological advances during the century allowed for easier manufacturing and distribution of board games and books about games, and the changing economic conditions created a larger market for them as well as more time in which to play them. These changing conditions not only made games more profitable, but they also increased the influence of games on many facets of culture. Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America focuses on the material and visual culture of both American and British games, examining how cultures of play intersect with evolving gender norms, economic structures, scientific discourses, social movements, and nationalist sentiments.
"In their carefully edited and meticulously researched essay collection devoted to nineteenth-century games (and, by extension, to transatlantic 'cultures of play'), Ann R. Hawkins, Erin N. Bistline, Catherine S. Blackwell, and Maura Ives lead a remarkably cohesive 18-person team of game historians, literary and media scholars, and even a professional game designer into the 'unfamiliar wonderland,' as they term it, of nineteenth-century game-play." — ALH Online Review
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From Snapdragon to Threecard Loo: Rediscovering NineteenthCentury Games
Ann R. Hawkins, Miles A. Kimball, Erin N. Bistline, Allison Whitney, and Catherine S. Blackwell
Section I: Games in Motion
1. Bodies in Play: Boxing, Dance, and the Science of Recreation
Kristin Flieger Samuelian and Mark Schoenfield
2. Baseball in the Frame of Gilded-Age America
Matthew Von Vogt
3. "We are only horses and don't know": Sport and Danger in Fox Hunting
Erin N. Bistline
Section II: Communal Games
4. "The Memory Game": Play, Trauma, and Great Expectations
Sean Grass
5. Seeing Victorian Culture through Croquet's "Treacherous Wire Portal"
Catherine S. Blackwell
6. Acting Charades in 1873: Girls and the Stakes of the Game
Heather Fitzsimmons Frey
Section III: Playing the World
7. Dangerous Games: The Advent of Wargaming in the Nineteenth Century
Andrew Byers
8. The United States as Wonderland: British Literature, U.S. Nationalism, and NineteenthCentury Children's and Family Board and Card Games
Michelle Beissel Heath
9. Gaming the Great Exhibition of 1851: Children's Board Games, Display, and Imperial Power
Megan A. Norcia
10. Teetotum Lives: Mediating Globalization in the NineteenthCentury Board Game
Siobhan Carroll
Section IV: Books, Boards, and Other Objects
11. What Did They Play, and What Does This Say?: A Quantitative and Cultural Analysis of British Collected Games in the Nineteenth Century through the Games Research Database
Maurice Suckling
12. Professor Hoffmann's Victorian Puzzles and Stage Magic
Andrew Rhoda
13. "An Endless Round of Delights": Materializing the Toy Theatre
Jennie MacDonald
14. The Game of Authors, 1861–1900: A Case History
Maura Ives
Contributors
General Index
Games Index