Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American

Open through November 27, 2016 in the Allesee Gallery of Culture

Our national pastime has played a crucial role in understanding, and sometimes challenging, what it means to be American. Every triumph and defeat, every hero on and off the field, has become another chapter in the history we all share. For immigrants and minority groups especially, it has served as a pathway for learning and understanding American values. Now on view in the Detroit Historical Museum’s Allesee Gallery of Culture, Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American explores how baseball has served as a pathway for learning and understanding American values for Jews and other immigrant groups and their descendants.

Organized by the National Museum of American Jewish History and now traveling to sites across the country, the exhibition asks: Why have so many immigrant groups and minority communities identified with, taken pride in and felt connected to the nation’s pastime? Did baseball impact how American Jews established affinities with other racial and ethnic minorities? And how did baseball shape Americans’ views of American identity? Beginning with the Civil War era and continuing to the present day, Chasing Dreams addresses these questions and explores how baseball has served as an arena in which values, identity, ethnicity and race have been projected, contested and occasionally solidified.

Chasing Dreams celebrates baseball and highlights the role of baseball’s game changers—not only major league players but also vendors, team owners, minor leaguers, amateur players, scouts, broadcasters, journalists, novelists and fans—who challenged the status quo and inspired the nation. This national story also includes locally curated stories and artifacts. It is presented locally by the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan and the Detroit Historical Society. 

Supported  by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.