I don’t know what to say. As much as I enjoy watching the Durham Bulls, I was spectactularly ignorant of baseball’s history, other than having some notion that it was a 19th-century thing.
“Rivka fixes this”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#10843352196650749, with a discussion of it’s late-18th-century appearance in Jane Austen novels, and further references–ones that also mention “Morris-dancing”:http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/subway/4346/pages/morris.html, natch–from the earliest parts of that century.
And the Steven Jay Gould quote on the page uses the word _tendentious_. So there.
