Heather Nathans
Kenneth Cohen does far more than simply read sporting culture as a metaphor for American politics. He interrogates how this culture emerged as a means to identify insiders and outsiders in the nation's political landscape.
Brian Luskey
Kenneth Cohen reassesses American politics and society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by using sporting culture as a lens through which to view the rise of democracy, capitalism, and cultural notions of respectability, citizenship, self-making, risk-taking, and rough play that became the cornerstones of white American manhood. Undergraduates will warm to the subject matter of They Will Have Their Game and to the historical actors whose triumphs and trials Cohen winningly chronicles.
Peter S. Onuf
Kenneth Cohen reconstructs a lost world of sporting contests—at taverns, race tracks, and theaters—that will be strangely familiar to contemporary readers. Sports shaped political conflict, he argues, simultaneously negotiating class tensions, defining racial and gender boundaries, and justifying the concentration of wealth and power. They Will Have Their Game brings sports history into the mainstream, offering a fresh and provocative account of the origins and development of democracy in America.