This collection of 19 essays examine the role of baseball's Cubs in the history and politics of Chicago. They focus on topics such as the rise of a nationwide fan base through the long reach of superstation WGN; the local uses and views of icons Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Ryne Sandberg; historical divides along lines of race (on the field) and class (in the stands); Wrigley Field as a public space both sacred and cursed; the importance of local and nationwide media coverage; and the Cubs' impact on Chicago music and literature.

"What kind of reputation does your neighborhood have, and how does this affect your daily life? Are you embarassed or proud when you share this information or when friends come over for dinner? Are you surrounded by businesses that cater to your needs and reflect your sense of self, or does your heart sink when you gaze down your block? As sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga demonstrate in A Good Reputation, people's feelings about their neighborhood and its reputation have an outsized effect on either addressing or driving inequality. In this book, they take a close look at Houston, Texas's historic Northside barrio-a high-poverty urban neighborhood. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with poor, working-class, and middle-class Latinx people and additional interviews with Black, White, and multiracial local stakeholders, they examine how and why neighborhood reputation shapes unequal urban processes. The authors center people's own perceptions of their neighborhood, leveraging these data to foreground how neighborhood heterogeneity, Whiteness, and placemaking intersect with and shape stakeholders' constructions of neighborhood reputation. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga ultimately demonstrate how constructing a neighborhood as "nice" or "ghetto" has profound implications for neighborhood inequality. In the process, they develop a theoretically rich, empirically detailed account of urban neighborhood inequality that brings to the fore understudied communities, processes of relation formation across class and racial lines, and ways these communities develop cultural logics about specific places"--

Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink's raw telling of his descent into America's Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over drugs and hatred. Frank's violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learnedto question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremacy movement and began speaking on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League. A story of fighting the demons of hatred and addiction, Frank's downfall and ultimate redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.

Professional baseball is full of arcane team names. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, owe their nickname to the trolley tracks that honeycombed Brooklyn in the early 1880s. (Residents were "trolley dodgers.") From the Negro Leagues, there were the Pittsburgh Crawfords (sponsored early by the Crawford Bath House and Recreation Center); from the minors, the Tucson Waddies (slang for cowboy) and, later, the Montgomery Biscuits (for the would-be concessions staple); from overseas, the Adelaide, Australia, Bite (a shark reference but also a pun for bight) and the Bussum, Netherlands, Mr. Cocker HCAW (the sponsoring restaurant chain, followed by the acronym for the official team name, Honkbalclub Allan Weerbaar). This comprehensive reference book explains the nicknames of thousands of major and minor league franchises, Negro League and early independent black clubs, and international teams--from 1869 through 2011.

The modern world may believe that authenticity empowers us to be our true selves. However, is this really true for all people? Would authenticity be accepted by others if it does not fit within the conceptions of those who embody "nationally authorised" attributes? Drawing upon an in-depth study of young children in Dublin’s North inner city, The Body, Authenticity and Racism offers detailed insight into how racism is created and perpetuated within 7–9-year-old boys’ interactions with one another. Indeed, through unique empirical data, this enlightening title demonstrates the importance of discussing the body when examining racism – not only in how the body is judged and racialised by other people, but how it is an apparent medium through which racism operates and disappears into. Garratt also explores how masculinity, belonging to a local area and being accepted as ‘Irish’ is intricately interwoven within gendered and racist assumptions; which comes not only from wider discourses but are actively constructed and reconstructed by children themselves. Using a Bourdieusian method of analysis and phenomenological philosophy, this book ultimately highlights the role of authenticity in hiding racism amongst children. A timely volume, it will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Irish Studies and Masculinities Studies.