Peter Rutkoff
Pinstripes
- published by Atmosphere Press
- available in print and ebook formats
About the author
Peter Rutkoff is an award-winning teacher and writer. He founded and chairs the American Studies program at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. At Kenyon he was the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor from 1997 to 2000 and the Robert Oden Professor of American Studies from 2004 and 2009.
As The co-founder of the Crossroads Seminar in African American studies, Rutkoff specializes and directs several projects that work in close collaboration with secondary teachers across Ohio.
Rutkoff is the co-author, with Will Scott, of three books, New School, New York Modern: The Arts and the City, and Fly Away: The Great African American Migrations. He has also written several works of fiction including a collection of short stories, Cooperstown Chronicles, and the novels Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago and Irish Eyes.
Rutkoff co-directed several Teaching American History Projects, was awarded Fulbright fellowships to Paris in 1968 and Cyprus in 2005, and was the recipient of Kenyon’s Trustee Teaching Excellence Award in 2004.
A native of New York City, educated at St. Lawrence University and the University of Pennsylvania, Rutkoff has resided in Gambier Ohio since 1971.
About the book
Imagine a time when Major League Baseball has imploded under the weight of its own making—a scandal over hall of fame elections—and has been forced to restructure on a new model. Teams are now owned and run by the cities in which they play, and in addition to playing baseball, players must work as city employees. In New York, the team’s first baseman also works as a NYPD plainclothes detective.
When the mayor recruits local businesswoman, Veronica Silvers, aka Nica, to become the new Yankees general manager, it’s seen as a new era for women and for baseball. And Nica meets the challenge when she signs a young talented left-handed hurler to the big club. Ellie Ford is the granddaughter of legendary Yankee players Whitey Ford and Elston Howard.
Despite Ellie’s talent, not everyone is rooting for her. The city’s male management secretly wants the team to fail for financial reasons. When they demand that Ellie is benched, Nica must stand up to them. With the help of rookie sports writer Beth Cooper, Nica allows Ellie to prove that women are strong and talented enough to excel in the male-dominated world of professional baseball.
In /Pinstripes/, Rutkoff, author of /Shadow Ball/, imagines the New New York Yankees and the opportunities that MLB 2.0 will offer to women for the first time.
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Resources
The Kenyon Academic Partnership, KAP
The Kenyon Academic Partnership, KAP, is a collaborative educational project between Kenyon College and selected secondary schools in Ohio. KAP seeks to provide good students with college-level courses taught in their schools and supported by Kenyon faculty. Through these courses students can experience the intellectual challenges that will enhance their pre-college education and prepare them for successful and enriching college careers. Finally, KAP seeks to create a common educational ground for Ohio’s public, private, and parochial students and faculty, one that will address students from all backgrounds and all economic levels.
KAP is an early college program in which 34 central and northern Ohio public and independent secondary schools offer various Kenyon College introductory level courses on their own campuses. The program not only permits students to earn college placement and credit before leaving high school, but imitates as closely as possible a college environment in the nature and scope of reading, writing, and laboratory assignments, and the process or atmosphere of a college class.
North by South
The North by South webpage explores multiple dimensions of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cities. Epic in scale, monumental in its long-term social and cultural impact, the Great Migration stands as the largest internal movement of people in the history of the United States.
Between the years 1900 and 1960, over 4,809,000 African-Americans fled the South’s oppressive conditions. The vast majority of these migrants settled in Northern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York.
The North by South webpage seeks to illuminate the numerous effects of Northern migration on African-American culture by exploring three distinct patterns of migration –.the migration of blacks from: South Carolina to New York City, the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and Birmingham, Alabama, to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. By focusing on specific patterns of migration, one can closely identify the transmission and transformation of African-American culture and social customs witnessed in these urban communities.
Gullah Project
Today only six thousand Gullah speakers remain and the majority live on St. Helena, a sea-island across the sound from Hilton Head, in Beaufort County, South Carolina. A combination of unique historical circumstances allowed them as freedmen and women to gain title to the land they once worked as slaves, and hence to preserve their culture. That cultural independence has enabled St. Helena, unlike its neighbor Hilton Head, to resist the allure of development.
The Kenyon Gullah Digital Archive collects the oral histories of Gullah people who live and work on St. Helena. A team of public school teachers from Cleveland, Ohio, working with Rutkoff and Will Scott of Kenyon College, conducted the interviews in the summer of 2011. The residents of St. Helena welcomed these teachers into their homes, places of work, and their churches. While the archive is a work in progress, it offers a unique window in the history and culture of a unique people.
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