Dorothy Seymour Mills

Dorothy Seymour Mills is the country’s first female baseball historian. She loves the English language, especially writing, researching, and editing, and she learned to love history by working for 40 years with her late husband, Dr. Harold Seymour, who became the first historian ever to write scholarly baseball history. Their three books about early baseball history for Oxford University Press are the classics of the genre.

Ms. Mills has written 25 books, half of which are still in print. She has written articles about linguistics, reading instruction, baseball history, and other subjects. Some of her articles and reviews appear in scholarly journals.

Her three-volume series of historical novels presents a story about the 1930s Austrian Nazis that reviewers call “engrossing,” with a strong and engaging female lead character who finds herself involved in suspenseful events, all historically based.

Ms. Mills also published a dozen children’s books; one of them, Ann Likes Red, has become a classic.

Of her two most recent books, both published by McFarland, one is her revealing autobiography, A Woman’s Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour (2004), and the other is her declaration that baseball is still the American national pastime: Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places (2010).

Book Reviews by Dorothy Seymour Mills

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This autobiographical book, an assertive explanation of Islam, will clarify Muslim beliefs for many readers.

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Perhaps you never thought about major-league baseball as a monopoly, but it is.

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Larry Ruttman has a mission. With his book on American Jews and baseball, he wants to prove that successful Jewish Americans connected to baseball owe their success to Jewish values.

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“What Robinson did on the baseball diamond was merely part of his effort to show black people how to be their very best and to show white people how to remove the barriers keeping blacks fr

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“Anyone who wants to advance beyond the stage of fandom to understand what it takes to establish and run professional baseball would do well to read Mr.

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“Bluegrass Baseball performs a reality check for prospective players and owners in the minor leagues.”

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“. . . brings some balance into the picture, and fans would do well to add it to their understanding of their National Game.”

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“Conspiracy of Silence offers overwhelming evidence of the effectiveness of the black press in advancing integration in this country.”

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In this carefully prepared history dominated by the larger-than-life player Babe Ruth, author Robert Fitts corrects the errors of previous books about the famous baseball tour of Japan 1934.

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“the main points of this powerful book . . . ought to be on the reading list of every university course on American Foreign Policy.”

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“Surdam’s book represents the best and probably the only solid study of major-league baseball’s economic situation during the Depression.”

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When late in the 1800s the professional baseball players formed a union and set up their own league, they caused a revolution of sorts in pro ball.

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Picture a league full of pro players, several from the United States and the rest from Canada, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, and the Ukraine—all playing on a base

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This story, written in the voice of the manager of a minor-league team, sounds authentic because it opens by presenting events that could really happen, and describes characters that might have liv

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For her husband’s baseball club, and for black people in Newark, Effa Brooks Manley acted in the 1930s and 40s as a goad, a responsible manager, a pest, a sexual attraction, a civil rights activist

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". . .an impressive work, abounds with new information about the formation of what Americans have long thought of as their national game . . ."

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It’s not unusual for scholars to come up with approximately the same idea at about the same time.

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Despite some writers’ claims that baseball is declining in popularity, its hold on American fans has never been more secure.

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It’s not unusual for scholars to come up with approximately the same idea at about the same time.

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Americans viewing those old and trite film shots of people lounging around languidly in opium dens, powerless to escape from their drugged reveries, used to feel scorn for those addicts.

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This book will help you understand seemingly inexplicable events that occur in baseball games. Why, for example, does a pitcher try to intimidate a batter by deliberately throwing at his head?

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The question that the title of this book inspires—Did baseball grow out of cricket?—receives a clear answer here: no, the two games are “sporting cousins.”

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This historically accurate book, a real gift to children, explains the effective and admirable life of Effa Manley, the first important female baseball clubowner.

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In this innovative novel, the author makes all too clear the impossibility of a divorced father’s leading a normal life while playing professional baseball.

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Like many of today’s women players, Toni Stone grew up loving baseball and playing it every chance she got. And also like them, she often found it tough to get into the boys’ and men’s games.