Kenneth Cohen
MCEAS Consortium Fellow

kcohen@udel.edu

“To Give Good Sport: The Economic Culture of Sporting Leisure in Early America, 1750-1850”

My dissertation traces the evolving relationships between producers and consumers of "sporting leisure" activities such as theatre, horse racing, and billiards. The project outlines the rise of a commercial entertainment industry in the 1790s and describes how the pursuit of profit motivated investors and managers to alter the spatial organization of entertainment venues, resulting in a rare degree of social mixing and mobility. Yet the boundaries of this fluid sporting world were set at racial and gender lines, and the project concludes by illustrating sporting leisure's influence on the formation of the white male polity.

Return to Current Fellows Page