ABSTRACT
The Mills Commission undertook the task of "inventing a tradition" and established that Cooperstown gave rise to baseball. Stephen Clark and his assistant Alexander Cleland in the 1930s combined their efforts to "spatialize" their capital, as it were, by embedding a baseball monument and museum within a carefully negotiated local landscape. The relationship of the Field of Dreams site to history is perhaps even more elusive and slippery than is seen in Cooperstown; nevertheless, it is a relationship that narrates a certain affective attitude about history, eliding it with nostalgia. The "family," as a category of anthropological and sociological analysis, has a long history and should not be accepted as given or unproblematic. Clearly, family is a complex and loaded term, used conceptually at different times for different purposes. It is reasonably clear that baseball is constructed as a masculine activity despite its many female practitioners and enthusiasts.
