New Books In Popular Culture

Today we are joined by Paul Hensler, author of the book The New Boys of Summer: Baseball’s Radical Transformation in the Late Sixties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Paul is a baseball historian and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He has also written The American League in Transition, 1965-1975: How Competition Thrived When the Yankees Didn’t, and has written for NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture and the Baseball Research Journal. Hensler, who owns a masters degree in history, examines the issues that were percolating not only in Major League Baseball as the 1960s drew to a close, but also the political, social and cultural upheaval caused by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and the baby boomers who were coming of age. Baseball was on the verge of expansion, was dealing with an ineffective commissioner and was in the early stages of a labor movement that would radically change the game. American society and culture were in flux, Hensler writes, and a