LISNews: Librarian News

A New York University librarian has discovered two 19th century newspaper articles that shed light on the origins of baseball:

It is as elusive as the search for Atlantis, as tangled in legend as the quest for the Holy Grail. For nearly a century, historians have trolled stacks of dusty tomes in hopes of unearthing the origins of baseball. . . Now, two newspaper references to baseball have turned up that show that an organized version of the game was being played even earlier in New York City. The articles, discovered by a librarian at New York University, George A. Thompson Jr., bolster a growing consensus that baseball emerged gradually, by evolution and not by invention. [More from the New York Times]