Setting the Records Straight
Major League Baseball has added statistics from the Negro leagues, shaking up several leaderboards and shining a long-overdue spotlight on some of the greatest athletes to play the game. Josh Gibson saw the biggest boost, as he became MLB’s all-time leader in batting average (.372) and set the single-season record (.466, in 1943). Beyond Gibson, many other legends, including Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard, have been officially enshrined in the record books.
Josh Gibson Is Now MLB’s All-Time Batting, Slugging and OPS Leader
© Bettmann/Getty Images
Satchel Paige’s 1.01 ERA in 1944 Is Now the Third-Best Season All-Time
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The Story of the Negro Leagues
RLPM Collection/Alamy
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The Many Leaves of Grass
Today marks the 205th birthday of Walt Whitman, one of America’s greatest poets, known for his masterpiece Leaves of Grass. True to Whitman’s expansive nature, the book was something of a living document, as he constantly revised it up until his death. Here’s more on his magnum opus.
Forward
The first edition, published in 1855, featured 12 then-untitled poems and lacked a table of contents and byline. The book included the noted “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” But that first edition was only a starting point, and would be followed by five revised and three reissued editions during his lifetime—poems were even added posthumously. Whitman, at 36 years old, was just getting warmed up.
Expansion
By the time the third edition was published five years later, 122 new poems had been added, raising the page count from 95 in the first edition to a staggering 456. Among the additions were the “Calamus” poems which describe an intense same-sex love affair. The fourth edition added the Civil War poems, including “Drum-Taps,” as well as the popular “O Captain! My Captain!” The seventh edition, published in 1881, grouped the poems in their final order.
The end
Now 72 years old, Whitman prepared a final edition, published in January 1892 just a couple of months before his death. The “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass featured 389 poems and an updated illustration of the poet, 37 years after the first edition.
Feinberg-Whitman Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USZ62-82781)
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