Saying It's So

Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans. Offering insights into what different cultural narratives reveal about their creators and the eras in which they were produced, Saying It's So is a complex study of cultural values, memory, and the ways people make meaning.

Addressing the relationship between cultural narratives and social reality, Nathan considers the media's coverage of scandal -- from front-page attention to scathing commentaries and cartoons -- when the story broke in 1920 and in the following years. He also examines how oral tradition reiterated the scandal before new narratives began to appear at midcentury.

In a series of astute reflections on Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural, Eliot Asinof's popular history Eight Men Out, and the work of the historians David Voigt and Harold Seymour, Nathan sheds light on the ways cultural and historical meaning is produced. Also considered are representations of the scandal in popular fiction and film during the Reagan era, the popular tourist destination and baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa, created for the filmField of Dreams, Ken Burns's television documentary Baseball, and the country's reactions to the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike.