Casway, Jerrold

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Casway, Jerrold

(Jerrold I. Casway)

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Temple University, B.A., M.A.; University of Maryland, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Social Sciences/Education, Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD 21044. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Professor, author. Howard Community College, Columbia, MD, professor of history, 1971–, division chair, director of Rouse Scholars.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Owen Roe O'Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1984.

Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN), 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A nonfiction book examining the culture of nineteenth-century baseball.

SIDELIGHTS: A professor of history, Jerrold Casway has focused on Irish topics in works such as the 1984 title, Owen Roe O'Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland, and the 2004 book, Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball. The latter title focuses on Delahanty, an Irish baseball player who held the fourth highest batting average in the history of the sport. Delahanty's career was cut short, however, when his body was found at the foot of Niagara Falls in 1903. A flamboyant character, Delahanty was, according to Casway's account, fond of a life style that salary caps at the time thwarted.

Writing in History: Review of New Books, John E. Dreifort praised Casway for his "fascinating, carefully researched biography of a long-neglected baseball hero." Similarly, Laura Kopp, writing in Maryland's Archivists' Bulldog, found the book "a vivid portrait of how the sons of Irish famine immigrants revolutionized the game of baseball in the late nineteenth century." For James Silas Rogers, reviewing the book in the Irish Literary Supplement, "Casway's account of the star's self-destructive end, which sifts through the competing accounts of his death, is particularly compelling."