About 10 years ago, while he was developing a course at University of Illinois Chicago, Michael Antonucci, associate professor of English and American studies, stumbled upon an old and dusty copy of Frank J. Basloe’s I Grew Up With Basketball: Twenty Years of Barnstorming with Cage Greats of Yesterday, then long out of print. Basloe (1887–1966) was born in Hungary and immigrated as a child with his family to the United States in the late 19th century.

“It’s a great American coming-of-age tale in which a Jewish immigrant becomes (in his words) ‘a toned American’ through the new game called basketball,” explained Dr. Antonucci. “From this perspective, the text gives scholars and students a great snapshot of the US in the early 20th century. Trains, cities, towns, games, work, and the hustle are present throughout the text.” Realizing that the book had real value for his work in American studies at KSC, Dr. Antonucci tried using a pdf copy of I Grew Up With Basketball as a text it in his class. Obviously, that was far from an ideal solution, so he proposed that the University of Nebraska Press reprint the book, for which he wrote a new introduction.

His effort “represents the sort of resource recovery and scholarly analysis that interdisciplinary Americanists do,” Dr. Antonucci said. “The text might be used in courses on biography or sports studies/sport and society. It might be a historical document in an American social history course. It also offers a valuable glimpse into the way ethnicity and whiteness converge and develop within the industrializing 20th century US.”

On the night that Dr. Antonucci opened the box containing his first copies of the book, he received an email from the author’s great-granddaughter. The family was delighted to have the book back in print.