Upcoming Events

Weeknights at the Wagner

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Birthplace of Philadelphia Baseball

An Illustrated Presentation By Dr. Jerrold Casway

4:00 - 7 :00 PM

Lecture at 5:30 PM

Base-ball match between the Athletics, of Philadelphia, PA and the Atlantics,

of Brooklyn, N.Y., played at Philadelphia, October 30, 1865. Sketched by J.B. Beale.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is seen in the background.

Join us for the last weeknight lecture of the season as we are taken back to the middle of the 19th century to explore the ball fields of North Philadelphia, where the earliest professional baseball games were played.

Dr. Casway will present a history of Philadelphia baseball from its mid-19th century origins through the construction of Shibe Park (Connie Mack Stadium) in 1909. His focus will be the ball fields of North Philadelphia, especially the Columbia-Montgomery axis that was the birthplace of the emerging national pastime. The Wagner Free Institute and its neighbors were witness to the game's development, as the Philadelphia Athletic's first ball filed was located just across 17th Street.

Dr. Jerrold Casway is a professor of History and the chairman of the Social Sciences Division at Howard Community College. He has many research interests, including early modern British History, nineteenth-century baseball and the development of the national pastime in Philadelphia. The author of two books and more than fifty articles, Dr. Casway has spoken on a variety of topics on both sides of the Atlantic.