[Ads-l] "baseball player", 1858, from Walt Whitman

[Joel Berson]

"[The comfortable shoes] now specially worn by base-ball players ...".

Interdates OED3 "baseball player" 1856 (earliest) -- 1970.


>From the newly-discovered 47,000-word "journalistic series" _Manly Health and Training_ (1858), now online in _The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review_ (Volume 33, Number 3 (2016), Special Double Issue: Walt Whitman’s Newly Discovered “Manly Health and Training”).  See NYTimes, April 30, 2016, "Long-Lost Tips by Whitman: Up, You Idler!", by Jennifer Schuessler, A1/6; source on A3/1.  Online as 

Walt Whitman Promoted a Paleo Diet. Who Knew?



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| Walt Whitman Promoted a Paleo Diet. Who Knew?Found: a nearly 47,000-word journalistic series called “Manly Health and Training” that had been lost for more than 150 years. |
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| View on www.nytimes.com | Preview by Yahoo |
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There may be more on base-ball -- Schuessler's article says "That torrent of advice that follows touches on sex, war, climate, bathing, gymnastics, baseball, footwear, depression, alcohol, shaving and the perils of “too much brain action and fretting,” in sometimes rambling prose that draws freely, Mr. Turpin notes in an introductory essay, from Whitman’s reading in publications like Water-Cure Journal and The American Phrenological Journal" (A3/3).

List members may be interested that Mr. Turpin, a graduate student, "was browsing in digitized databases of 19th-century newspapers, entering various pseudonyms that Whitman, a prolific journalist, was known to have used." The article goes on to outline the steps in Turpin's discovery (A3/1).


Joel

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