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The fertile North American continent provided its inhabitants with much free time for recreation and leisure. Colonists had brought with them European games and sports such as bowling, football, cricket, quoits, and cards.
In the early nineteenth century most Americans believed that time was meant to be filled by work. They looked with disfavor on recreational pursuits, including sports, dancing, drinking, music, theater, and art. This stern view of life had religious, technological, economic, and political roots.
The history of sports in the United States reveals that American football, baseball, softball, and indoor soccer evolved from older British sports— rugby football, British baseball, rounders, and association football, respectively.
By 1820 the indigenous middle-American sport of harness racing emerged. It was first reported in New York City in 1803. Men gravitated after work to the five-mile graveled stretch of Third Avenue to show off their family horse and buggy.
Alexander Graydon said that American ice skaters by the latter 18th century were “the best and most elegant in the world.” They were good swimmers, too: Benjamin Franklin had been expert at both skating and swimming from his Boston childhood, and as an elderly diplomat he amazed Parisians by casting off his clothes and swimming briskly ...
References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century. Like football, its most direct ancestors appear to be two English games: rounders (a children’s game...
Sporting experiences in colonial America, 1400-1750 -- Sport and pastimes in the American revolutionary era and early national period, 1750-1820 -- Antebellum health reforms and sporting forms, 1820-1860 -- Rise of rationalized and modern sport, 1850-1870 -- New identities and expanding modes of sport in the Gilded Age, 1870-1890 -- American ...