In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others.

They Will Have Their Game tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how its roots in masculine competition and risk-taking gradually developed gendered and racial limits and then spread from leisure activities to the consideration of elections as "races" and business as a "game." The result reorients the standard narrative about the rise of commercial popular culture to question the influence of ideas such as "gentility" and "respectability," and to put men like P. T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century in which sporting activities lie at the center and not the margins of economic and political history.

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In this highly readable scholarly work, Cohen offers a descriptive study in power and hierarchy in American society from 1750 to 1860 and the evolving role of 'sporting culture' in their expression. Well-chosen and well-placed reproductions of period artwork illustrate socialization between social groups and the exclusionary divides that increasingly restricted participation by women, black slaves, and freemen.

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They Will Have Their Game offers a compelling description of the process by which sporting culture emerged in eastern North America.... political and cultural historians should read it, and they should do so with care.

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The book is gracefully written, and a large number of well-chosen illustrations add to the narrative. They Will Have Their Game has many strengths. Perhaps most impressive is the research, especially in letters and legal records, which captures a level of detail I would not have thought possible.