An Incomplete Portrait of Baseball and America

When my brother was 12, the traveling baseball team he played on competed at a tournament in Cooperstown, New York. This place, he and his teammates were told, was baseball mecca—not just the home of Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame, but also the site where the future Union general Abner Doubleday had organized the sport’s first-ever game in 1839.

You won’t find any mention of Doubleday at the Library of Congress’s new exhibition, , for a very simple reason: The story, , isn’t true. Still, surveying the rich trove of historical documents and artifacts on display, it’s easy to see why organized baseball embraced the myth. illustrates how the game has benefited from the wealth of storytellers clamoring to burnish its all-American image over the years—even as the exhibit itself presents a polished