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Robert Elias

Biography

Robert Elias

Robert Elias is Dean’s Scholar and Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of San Francisco. His baseball books include THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad; BASEBALL AND THE AMERICAN DREAM: Race, Class, Gender and the National Pastime; THE DEADLY TOOLS OF IGNORANCE; and BASEBALL REBELS. His baseball essays have appeared in Nine, Jacobin, Baseball Research Journal, Pacific Historical Review, Diplomatic History, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. He’s also been published in the Washington Post, The Progressive, The Humanist, Social Policy, Peace Review, Counterpunch, Transatlantica, and many other periodicals and books. He is a longtime Society of American Baseball Research and Baseball Reliquary member. He lives in Mill Valley, CA, near San Francisco.

Robert Elias

Books by Robert Elias

Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Workers' Rights and American Empire
by Robert Elias and Peter Dreier - History, Nonfiction, Sports

In MAJOR LEAGUE REBELS, Robert Elias and Peter Dreier reveal a little-known yet important history of rebellion among professional ballplayers. These reformers took inspiration from the country’s dissenters and progressive movements, speaking and acting against abuses within their profession and their country. Elias and Dreier profile the courageous players who demanded better working conditions, battled against corporate power, and challenged America’s unjust wars, imperialism and foreign policies, resisting the brash patriotism that many link with the “national pastime.”

Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America
by Robert Elias and Peter Dreier - History, Nonfiction, Sports

Since baseball emerged in the mid-1800s to become America’s pastime, the nation’s battles over race, gender and sexuality have been reflected on the playing field, in the executive suites, in the press box and in the community. Some of baseball’s rebels are widely recognized, but most of them are either little known or known primarily for their baseball achievements --- not their political views and activism. BASEBALL REBELS tells stories of baseball’s reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America’s broader political and social protest movements, making the game --- and society --- better along the way.