WASHINGTON -- Before the United States existed, before Casey struck out and long before the Babe ever hit one out, a British poet described an early form of baseball played by English youngsters.
"The Ball once struck off,"Away flies the Boy
"To the next destin'd Post,
"And them home with joy."
The work is included in the first joint exhibit by the British Library and the Library of Congress. It opened Thursday. The chief director of the British Library, Brian Lang, read the lines of the poem "Base-Ball" from a collection of verses for children, printed in London in 1760. Earlier editions go back to 1744. The first American baseball game on record was played in Hoboken, N.J., on June 19, 1846.
Above the poem is a drawing of youngsters in three-cornered hats and knee-length coats. They stand in expectant attitudes next to waist-high "Posts" that look more like gravestones than bases.
Lang read out the full title of the palm-size volume:
"A little pretty pocket-book, intended for the instruction and amusement of little Master Tommy and pretty Miss Polly, with two letters from Jack the Giant Killer and also a ball and pin cushion."
He noted the resemblance to another children's game called rounders, still played in Britain. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, said the batter in rounders swings horizontally like a baseball batter -- unlike the cricket batsman, who holds his bat vertically.
Many Americans believe baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. Historians call this an error promoted by an incompetent commission report of 1908.
The exhibit takes visitors through history, with images of both conflict and concord. One of the earliest is a map dating back to 1585 that shows a raid by Sir Francis Drake against the Spanish fort at St. Augustine, Fla. That was almost a quarter century before the first successful British colony in Virginia.
A later document from the colonists is a petition to King George III, asking for better treatment. A bit later comes the original draft of the king's statement that the colonies are in rebellion. Along with that goes Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence, including some denunciations of the king that Congress crossed out.
A lithograph from 1866 called "the Eighth Wonder of the World: the Atlantic Cable" commemorates the first instantaneous messages across the Atlantic. Sheet music from two World Wars record both pro- and anti-British sentiment, including a song titled "We'll go over when it's over there."
One section of the show illustrates the influence of the Beatles in the United States, and of rock 'n' roll in Britain.
And a photograph shows British skinheads parading under a Confederate flag.