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  • Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters by Ben Green book cover
  • Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters by Ben Green book cover
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Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters

by Ben Green

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A history of basketball, spectacle, and social change

$16.54 USD
$25.85 USD $16.54 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A history of basketball, spectacle, and social change

Ben Green traces the Harlem Globetrotters from their Depression-era beginnings through their emergence as a leading basketball team and global sports attraction, their financial decline in the early 1990s, and their revival under Mannie Jackson. The book places the franchise’s on-court innovations alongside the racial segregation its players confronted, examining how the team helped shape public conversations about race and sport. Covering roughly eight decades, it also follows the shift from competitive basketball powerhouse to a widely recognized entertainment institution with an international reach.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Basketball history readers
  • Readers interested in race and American sports culture
  • Fans of the Harlem Globetrotters and sports-business history

Themes

Basketball historyRacism and segregationSports entertainmentAfrican American historyFranchise revival

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Before Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Julius Erving, or Michael Jordan––before Magic Johnson and Showtime––the Harlem Globetrotters revolutionized basketball and spread the game around the world. In Spinning the Globe, author Ben Green tells the story of this extraordinary franchise and iconic American institution. We follow the Globetrotters' rise from backwoods obscurity during the harsh years of the Great Depression to become the best basketball team in the country and, by the early 1950s, the most popular sports franchise in the world. Green brings to life their struggles with racism and segregation, and their influence upon a nation's views about race and sport. We witness the Globetrotters' fall from grace to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, and their ultimate rebirth under Mannie Jackson today, as they once again amaze kids and families around the world. Now in paperback, this is the true and complete story of their amazing eighty years as a team, told with lyrical prose and masterful storytelling by Ben Green.
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