ABSTRACT
In John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden, the "official historian of baseball" introduces one of the fundamental challenges posed to those who are interested in the history of the game. Because the history of the game is so intimately tied to reflections on what it means and has meant to be American and the cultural practices that define the national character, baseball's history is the subject of ongoing fascination for amateur and professional historians alike. From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, the "history" of baseball is as much about understanding how people have used the stories about the game's origins to explain what they believe about themselves, as it is about finding specific origins of the game's rules, rituals, and traditions. For Levi-Strauss, the histories of something as culturally significant to the French like the French Revolution or to Americans like baseball, are necessarily competing mythologies as much as they are chronicles of specific events.
