The Indianapolis Clowns, sometimes referred to as the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, they captured the affection of Americans of all ethnicities and classes

In the late 1930s, as the world moved closer to war, three vivacious Chinese women defied gender perceptions by becoming pilots. Driven by a fierce independent spirit, they realized their dream of flying, completed barnstorming goodwill missions across the Western Hemisphere, and captured the imagination of all those whose lives they touched. They were Hilda Yan, once China's representative at the League of Nations; Li Xiaqing, known as film actress Li Dandan before becoming China's "First Woman of the Air"; and Jessie Zheng, the only commissioned female officer in the Chinese Air Force. In a story almost forgotten to history, Patti Gully's exhaustive research delves into the personal lives of these women, uncovering their fascinating personalities, loves, passions, and above all their overwhelming sense of patriotism and duty. In a time when no Chinese woman could even drive a car, these aviatrixes used flight as a metaphor for their own freedom as well as a symbol of empowerment. Gully shows how, despite their success, their relationships with men were checkered and stormy, leaving behind the wreckage of broken marriages and the children they abandoned--the price they ultimately paid to realize their dream of flying. With an uncanny eye for detail and technical accuracy, Sisters of Heaven offers a rare look at a lost era in aviation history, gender studies, and the history of China and the West. Patti Gully is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg. She holds a BA in arts with an emphasis on English, religious studies, and classics. She also holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia. She is an amateur pilot and aviation history scholar and lives in Vancouver.

The untold story of one of the first Black players for the St. Louis Cardinals, who dreamed of leaving a lasting impact on Major League Baseball. Charlie Peete was poised for greatness. After a meteoric rise through the minor leagues, the rookie outfielder appeared in twenty-three games for the St. Louis Cardinals during the summer of 1956 and established himself as one of the best prospects in the organization—until a cruel twist of fate intervened. On his way to Venezuela to compete in a winter baseball league, Peete and his family died in a plane crash near Caracas. Nearly seven decades later, Cardinal Dreams revitalizes the legacy of Charlie Peete with the most comprehensive account to date of his remarkable life, including personal interviews with those who knew him and played with him. Raised under Jim Crow laws in southeastern Virginia, Peete broke into professional baseball in 1950 with the Negro American League’s Indianapolis Clowns, served his country admirably for two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, returned home to help integrate the Class B Piedmont League with the Portsmouth Merrimacs, and then climbed to the top of the St. Louis Cardinals organization at a time of rapid change under new ownership. Had Peete not lost his life in that plane crash, he likely would have become the first Black position player in franchise history to earn a permanent starting job. Charlie Peete’s death stunned the St. Louis Cardinals and left the baseball world to forever wonder what his career might have become. But, despite his premature and tragic ending, Peete changed the world for the better—and left a lasting impact on the sport he spent his life pursuing.

Draws on primary sources and more than 100 interviews in a richly detailed portrait of the influential baseball team owner and promoter, providing coverage of such topics as his relationships with his Chicago Cubs president father, his struggles with formidable war injuries and his steadfast advocacy of integration. 40,000 first printing.

A new edition of the classic tale of a barnstorming Jewish baseball team during the Great Depression Before penning his acclaimed graphic novel Market Day and founding the Center for Cartoon Studies, James Sturm proved his worth as a master cartoonist with the eloquent graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, one of the first breakout graphic novel hits of the twenty-first century. Sturm’s fascination with the invisible America has been the crux of his comics work, exploring the rarely-told or oft-forgotten bits of history that define a country. By reuniting America’s greatest pastime with its hidden history, the graphic novel tells the story of the Stars of David, a barnstorming Jewish baseball team of the depression era. Led by its manager and third baseman, the nomadic team travels from small town to small town providing the thrill of the sport while playing up their religious exoticism as a curio for people to gawk at, heckle, and taunt. When the team’s fortunes fall, the players are presented a plan to get people in the stands. But by placing their fortunes in the hands of a promoter, the Stars of David find themselves fanning the flames of ethnic tensions. Sturm’s nuanced composition is on full display as he deftly builds the climax of the game against the rising anti-semitic fervor of the crowd. Baseball, small towns, racial tensions, and the desperate grasp for the American Dream: The Golem’s Mighty Swing is a classic American novel.

This book is an examination of cultural resistance to segregation in the world of black baseball through an analysis of editorial art, folktales, nicknames, "manhood" and the art of clowning. African Americans worked to dismantle Jim Crow through the creation of a cultural counter-narrative that centered on baseball and the Negro Leagues that celebrated black achievement and that highlighted the contradictions and fallacies of white supremacy in the first half of the twentieth century.

Shares the story of Negro League team owner Alex Pompez's founding of a notorious Harlem numbers racket as part of his efforts to finance the New York Cubans, describing his role in retaining the team throughout integration, transitioning players to the majors, and achieving a Negro League World Series Championship.

Baseball pioneer J. L. Wilkinson (1878-1964) was the owner and founder, in 1920, of the famed Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. The only white owner in the Negro National League (NNL), Wilkinson earned a reputation for treating players with fairness and respect. He began his career in Iowa as a player, later organizing a traveling women's team in 1908 and the multiracial All-Nations club in 1912. He led the Monarchs to two Negro Leagues World Series championships and numerous pennants in the NNL and the Negro American League. During the Depression he developed an ingenious portable lighting system for night games, credited with saving black baseball. He resurrected the career of legendary pitcher Satchel Paige in 1938 and in 1945 signed a rookie named Jackie Robinson to the Monarchs. Wilkinson was posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, joining 14 Monarchs players.

A fascinating and charming encyclopedic collection of baseball firsts, describing how the innovations in the game—in rules, equipment, styles of play, strategies, etc.—occurred and developed from its origins to the present day. The book relies heavily on quotations from contemporary sources.

Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones. Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliché and to undermine another one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Brazil" is a raucous, ultimately mournful road trip. For Jane Hamilton, Wisconsin is a gorgeous but bittersweet homecoming, and for Kelly Cherry, in her achingly elegiac "As It Is in Heaven," it's the hopeful new world, juxtaposed with a bleak, tweedy England. Dwight Allen's "The Green Suit" evokes the young man edging toward adulthood, in a New York that's as flamboyant as an opera, and Tenaya Darlington, in her "A Patch of Skin," constructs a pure horror story, because the horror of loneliness is something we all know. Together Barnstorm's eclectic voices suggest that every coast now, even the Great Lakes' shores, are at the very center of our best, and truest, national literature. Not for sale in the United Kingdom.