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Article: Location, Location, Location: The Transmission of Racist Ideology in Baseball Cards
- Article from:
- Negro Educational Review
- Article date:
- April 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Negro Educational Review, Inc. Apr-Jul 2004. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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ABSTRACT.
While on the surface baseball cards may appear to be a mundane object of child's play, they are precious tools for examining U.S. society. Baseball cards not only hold a wealth of information regarding the players they feature, they also reveal much about the state of society at the time of their production and the individuals who collect them. In this paper we analyze the numbering system that the Topps Chewing Gum (Baseball Card) Company constructed and used between 1956-1980 to identify for all of America who were "the heroes of the game". Under the numbering system, each card in a set is assigned a specific number according to a hierarchical ordering of player prestige, ...