Born in 1871 on Maine’s Penobscot Indian reservation and nephew of a chief, Louis Sockalexis became professional baseball’s first American Indian player. Ultimately, his prowess on the diamond inspired the nickname Cleveland’s baseball team carries today. Baseball’s First Indian explores the brilliant but too-brief major league career of the “Deerfoot of the Diamond” at the end of the 1890s, follows his fall of New England’s minor leagues, and watches his final return to the reservation in...

At a time when countless educational reforms, mandates, and change programs are being foisted on our public schools, it seems clear that new approaches and solutions are needed. In The Living School, the author details the thinking that brought us to our current educational dilemma and the forces that formed our model of American schools. He explores new ways of thinking about school leadership, organizations, and learning, gently leading the reader to a new viewpoint of schools and the ed...

Following an extraordinary debut—17th place in the 1911 Boston Marathon—Penobscot Indian Andrew Sockalexis returned to run a spectacular Boston Marathon on a muddy, rainy course on April 19, 1912. Only twenty years old, running just his third marathon ever, he came in second and narrowly missed breaking the record time for that course.The greatest number of Native Americans ever to represent the United States occurred when Andrew Sockalexis joined Louis Tewanima and the legendary J...

Born in 1871 on Maine's Penobscot Indian reservation and nephew of a chief, Louis Sockalexis became professional baseball's first American Indian player. Ultimately, his prowess on the diamond inspired the name Cleveland's baseball team carries today.Exploring the brilliant but too-brief major league career of the "Deerfoot of the Diamond," Baseball's First Indian follows Sockalexis's rise to the majors, his fall to the minor leagues of New England, and his final return to the rese...

Robin Emery of Ellsworth, Maine is a pioneer in the sport of road racing, or distance running. She fell in love with the sport of running in 1967 and, fifty years later, she is still at it. When she started, women weren’t allowed to race with men and there were no sports teams for girls in schools, but that was no deterrent. Robin persisted, trying a range of sports as a child from golf to football before establishing herself in the field of running. Along the way she has encouraged and in...

Born in 1888 in what would soon be Oklahoma Territory, Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. After attending the Sac and Fox agency school and Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas, he transferred to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle he led the football team to victories over some of the nation’s best college teams—Army, Navy, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. In 1912 he participated in the Olympic Games in Stockholm, wi...

“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The NumberIn Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles a...

A biography of Jim Thorpe, the Native American sports icon and Olympic champion, that “goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty” (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered.Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentat...

Chris von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life's savings to found the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important -- and funniest -- figures in the game's history.Von der Ahe picked up the team for one reason -- to sell more beer. Then he helped gather a group of ragtag professional clubs together to create a maverick new league that would fight the haughty Nati...

This country and its people are made of the same hardy stuff that makes our game and our league. The Grey Cup has helped unite our country for 100 years now. And it has revealed us, built our pride and our sense of Canadianness in annual tributes to effort, sweat and toil. But what does 100 years of history and cultural relevance add up to? When we Canadians look at the Grey Cup, we see far more than a gleaming football trophy; we see a reflection of ourselves. After its first years as an ...

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest—these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team—the first dynasty of the 20th century.Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season—the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants an...

For readers of The Boys in the Boat and Against All OddsJoin a ragtag group of misfits from Dawson City as they scrap to become the 1905 Stanley Cup champions and cement hockey as Canada’s national pastimeAn underdog hockey team traveled for three and a half weeks from Dawson City to Ottawa to play for the Stanley Cup in 1905. The Klondikers’ eagerness to make the journey, and the public’s enthusiastic response, revealed j...