War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War

A "richly detailed" portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston (Michael S. Neiberg): baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard Law student Charles Whittlesey.





In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radical lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.



War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

Randy Roberts is the 150th anniversary distinguished professor of history at Purdue University. He is the award-winning author of many books on the intersection of popular and political history, including A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle (with Johnny Smith). He lives in Lafayette, Indiana.




Johnny Smith is the J. C. "Bud" Shaw professor of sports history and an associate professor of history at Georgia Tech. He is the coauthor of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (with Randy Roberts). He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.