They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic

They Will Have Their Game explores how games, sports, and theater helped shape American democracy during the formative years of the republic. Far from being an escape from everyday life, entertainments such as horse racing, playing cards, and theatergoing became central battlegrounds on which Americans of all backgrounds fought to secure rights, opportunities, and power.

Through dozens of compelling personal stories that draw on a wide range of previously unexamined evidence, Cohen illustrates why entertainment became more contested, or, as people in the period said it, "sporting," over the course of the century from 1760 to 1860. On one hand, harrowing tales of failure and bankruptcy explain why investors and professional performers increasingly catered to the demands of the widest audience possible, even if that diverse array of participants wanted to challenge social boundaries related to class, race, and gender. But on the other hand, the popularity of a sporting culture rife with challenge also helped politicians and businessmen use sporting culture to portray America as being more democratic than it was -- to the point of calling elections "races" and business a "game" in which the "best man won." So, over time, sporting culture evolved into both a breeding ground for assertions of democratic equality that led to Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, and Hamilton, as well as an arena for establishing the power of wealth that continues to resonate in the ranks of owners, producers, and luxury box attendees. Fusing critical and celebratory histories of entertainment, and reorienting those histories to put men like P.T. Barnum at the end rather than the beginning of the process, Cohen shows that -- since the country's birth -- America's political culture has been built as much from the sporting world of racing, theater, and taverns, as from legislation and weighty political theory. At a moment rife with debate about the relationship between politics and entertainment, They Will Have Their Game traces the long history of entertainment's impact on American politics and values.

Winner of the 2018 James Broussard Prize for the Best First Book on American History between the Revolution and the Civil War, awarded by the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.