Football is the world’s hottest ball sport, but, wherever American financial and tradition influence has been dominant, the attraction to baseball, basketball, and volleyball has tended to exceed that to football. Baseball, for instance, boomed in Cuba, the place Nemesio Guilló introduced the game to his countrymen in 1863, and in Japan, where Horace Wilson, an American educator, taught it to his Japanese students in 1873. It was, however, solely within the post-World War II world that U.S. influence generally overwhelmed British; only then did basketball and volleyball become globally popular. In the course of the 19th century, fashionable types of British sports unfold from the privileged classes to the widespread individuals. National organizations developed to standardize guidelines and rules, to rework sporadic problem matches into systematic league competition, to certify eligibility, and to register outcomes. Peasant girls participated freely in the ball video games and footraces of medieval times, …