A photograph of the University of Pennsylvania cricket team, 1887.

This group photograph shows thirteen members of a University of Pennsylvania college sports team in 1887, posing with balls and bats. They wear cricket uniforms, some with caps, except for one man who wears a buttoned suit with a tall bowler hat. Cricket is England’s national summer sport, a bat and ball game played between two teams in innings on an oval field. It is widely played around the world, especially in the British Isles and former British colonies like Australia, India, Pakistan, and the West Indies. Although there were intercollegiate American baseball teams by the 1880s, cricket was actually Penn’s first organized college sport and had been played there since 1842. British team sports—even in America—helped sustain Victorian masculine ideals of muscularity, camaraderie, sportsmanship, and discipline.