Baseball historian, Dorothy Seymour Mills, to award 2012 Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal

PRLog (Press Release) - Feb. 19, 2013 - The Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal is The Society of American Baseball Research’s annual award for the best book of baseball history or biography published during the previous year. The 2013 recipient is Robert Fitts for his book Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan. Mrs. Seymour, now Dorothy Seymour Mills, will present the Medal on March 17, at the NINE Baseball Conference of historians banquet in Tempe, Arizona, and talk about how this book fulfills the requirements of the award.

Notable is Dorothy Seymour Mills’ participation. She is an eminent baseball historian, author, and book reviewer. However, for years she collaborated with her late husband, but it was well after those years working as a team writing baseball history from the standpoint of professional historians, that Mrs. Mills received the recognition she deserved. Dorothy and Harold together made America’s national game a respectable subject for formal study by historians and wrote the first scholarly history of baseball. Prior to their work only sports writers, untrained in research and the historical viewpoint, were writing about the sport.

Beginning in 1949, the Seymours’ collaboration produced three books on baseball history that were published with Oxford University Press. Mrs. Seymour’s contributions were significant but Dr. Seymour insisted on concealing his wife’s participation and received sole credit as author. The team effort was finally acknowledge fifty years after the first book in the Oxford trilogy was published. Dorothy Seymour’s name was added as co-author and also placed on the title pages of those books.

Dorothy Seymour Mills today continues to document baseball history writing articles for baseball journals and baseball historical novels, Drawing Card, A Woman's Work: Writing Baseball History with Harold Seymour,(2004) and Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places (2010). She’s listed in Who's Who for Women, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in the World.

Working with New York Journal of Books, Ms. Mills reviewed Rob Fitts’ Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan. She praised Fitts’ thorough research debunking unfounded notions that prevailed: “In this carefully prepared history dominated by the larger-than-life player Babe Ruth, author Robert Fitts corrects the errors of previous books about the famous baseball tour of Japan 1934.”

Ms. Mills’ review was perhaps a harbinger of the significant accolade to come. Connect to New York Journal of Books and read the full review through the link below:
http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/banzai-babe-ruth-b...

While you’re at nyjournalofbooks.com  do take a moment to explore the sweeping range of insightful reviews by our panel of professional writers. Relax and browse, learn about current titles, and investigate older ones you may have missed. New York Journal of Books covers books of all types. We review the big titles and make an extra effort to cover those less publicized gems from small independent presses.

At New York Journal of Books our goal is to create a discussion between the reviewer and the reader, shaping a safe place in which authors can thrive in an oxygen-rich atmosphere of literary appreciation.

Let us help you find your next read.

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/12081477/1