games

Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

Travelers brought the Chinese game to American shores in the early 1920s. Why was it such a hit?

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting produced a pastime that bound a city together.

Searching for the first, in the 1860s.

Why the Potato Heads are the latest toys becoming more inclusive.

Native minstrelsy and the American summer camp movement.

The Timms provide the history behind their collection of 20th century mail-order novelty items.

Gameplay can be useful in history classrooms – but manufacturers have to think about how children will be affected by the competition.

You must always caulk the wagon. Never ford the river.

Pinball hasn’t always been an all-American game of fun: for decades it was an object of widespread moral outrage.

A lifelong passion for the national pastime led John Thorn to redefine the sport's relationship with statistics and reveal the truth behind its earliest days.

A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.

The fortunes of Coney Island have waxed and waned, but in the early twentieth century, its amusement parks became a major American export.

In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

Despite the prevalence of tricks and spooky spirits in earlier years, the American commercial holiday didn’t develop until the middle of the twentieth century.

The father of game theory helped develop the atom bomb—and thought he could calculate when to use it.

Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present.

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.

By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the "poor man's country club."

100 years ago, it took a combination of salesman and dictator to launch a historic era for black teams.