Christmas, Baseball, and the Civil War

For way, way too long, most Americans were led to believe that a guy named Abner Doubleday invented baseball. He was famous as a general in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, and had a cool-sounding name, so when that tale was told, it stuck. It wasn’t true, not even a little bit, and to Abner Doubleday’s credit he never made the claim himself.

By the …