Arguing that the court “embod[ies] conflicts over class, race, and gender, and serv[es] as a public theater for them,” he offers an impressive overview of the game—from its invention in the late 19th century through the rise of pro teams, and the impacts of Title IX and ESPN. The sections on basketball’s early days—including the struggles by Black and female athletes to break into the sport—are especially valuable.

Publishers Weekly

Sports historians have long hoped for a grand basketball narrative that appeals equally well to scholarly and popular audiences and centers the game at the heart of the American experience, alongside baseball and football- two sports that have elicited far more scholarly attention. Thomas Aiello has finally written that book. It comes in the form of a concise yet sweeping narrative that traces basketball's evolution, both at the college and professional levels, from its origin and early development in the 1890s, through its mid-twentieth-century maturation, and to its ascent as a premier professional sport, embodied by the post-1970s National Basketball Association (NBA).... [This book is] the most comprehensive and all-around best historical overview yet written about American Basketball and is a volume that no sports historian or basketball enthusiast should do without.

Great Plains Quarterly

Hoops is more than a history of basketball; it's a cultural history of modern America with basketball as the protagonist. Aiello connects basketball to broader historical issues of race and gender, extraordinarily presenting the material in profoundly relevant and refreshingly readable ways. This book includes impressive storytelling, authentic cultural critique, and ends with a unique bibliographic essay more comprehensive than anything anywhere else.

Dr. Chad Carlson, Hope College Associate Professor of Kinesiology/Director of General Education, Author of Making March Madness: The Early Years of the NCAA, NIT, and College Basketball Championships, 1922-1951

Using basketball as a central theme, Aiello provides a wonderful overview of cultural life in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries...[his] enthusiasm for basketball shines boldly through as he spins a great story.

Murry R. Nelson, Professor Emeritus of Education and American Studies, Penn State University, Author, The Originals: The New York Celtics Invent Modern Basketball

Thomas Aiello’s Hoops is what it promises: a broad cultural history of basketball in America since the game’s late-Gilded Age invention. The author has written extensively and primarily on race, but in this book, one of his four with sport as a topic, Aiello presents basketball as something that both engages and reflects broad cultural changes... Readers [will] find this book useful as something to use or suggest to a mentee developing a basketball-related research project. Aiello’s work is readable, it is well contextualized, and he is at his best when considering race. A strength here is a valuable description of basketball’s historiography and a great bibliographic essay.

North Carolina Historical Review