• Comment: Close but not quite enough independent, significant coverage. WikiOriginal-9 (talk) 00:55, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: Citation issues are still present, and also a lot of the descriptions of the subject seem to be puffed up and promotional via uncited claims that constitute original research. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 04:27, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: Some more inline citations are needed. Take a look at WP:REFB for further info. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 22:15, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

George Gmelch (born 28 December 1944 in New York) is emeritus professor of anthropology at Union College.^[1] and the University of San Francisco^[2]. His long-term field research includes studies of nomadic Irish Travellers in Ireland, Roma and Traveller communities in the UK, fishing communities in Alaska and Newfoundland; return migrants in Barbados, Ireland, and Newfoundland, the culture of pro baseball in the US and Canada; and tourism workers and impacts in Barbados and the Napa Valley, California. He is the author and co-author of sixteen books, including In the Field: The Work and Life of Anthropology^[3]­ with Sharon Gmelch (University of California Press), Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life^[4] with S Gmelch (Indiana), Double Passage: The Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home^[5] (Michigan), and Tasting the Good Life: Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley^[6] with S. Gmelch (Indiana), winner of the 2012 Gourmand International Award for the best book on wine tourism^[7]

After his sophomore year in college (1965) Gmelch signed a professional baseball contract with the Detroit Tigers. Over the next few seasons he played on four minor league teams with his best season in the Florida State League where he hit .280.^[8] As political scientists Peter Dreier and Rob Elias note in their book Baseball Rebels, “...in the Carolina League towns he played in, Gmelch was shocked by the segregation and racism he observed... One evening, passing the general manager’s office before a game, he witnessed members of the Rocky Mount’s Chamber of Commerce reminding the ballclub’s GM that the town would not support the team if there were “too many colored boys” in the starting lineup... Gmelch soon learned that the ball field itself was sometimes used by the local Ku Klux Klan for gatherings, and that the town’s police chief was a member of the Klan and his brother a Grand Dragon.^[9]

Gmelch had been writing monthly articles about life in the minor leagues for a home town California newspaper;^[10] then wrote a piece piece “Life in Rocky Mount with the Klan,” describing the segregation and racism he had witnessed and noting the police chief’s involvement in the KKK. A reader sent copies to the Rocky Mount Police Department and the Chamber of Commerce. A week later he was given his unconditional release.^[9]  

Thirty years later, then a longtime professor of anthropology, Gmelch returned to his baseball roots to examine the culture of the sport.  In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People^[11] (Smithsonian) he and his student J.J. Weiner looked at the varied occupations and work of professional baseball.   Subsequently, Gmelch described the culture of ballplayers in Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball (Smithsonian Press)^[12] and then examined baseball cross-culturally in Baseball without Borders: An International Pastime (Nebraska)^[13]. Finally, he revisited his own baseball experiences in a memoir Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties (Nebraska)^[14].  The latter was a finalist for the Casey Award for the best baseball book of 2016.^[15] 

His best-known research was among Irish Travellers. In 1971-72, he and his anthropologist wife Sharon spent a year living in a horse-drawn wagon in an encampment on the outskirts of Dublin for their PhD research. His work on this nomadic group’s adaptation to urban life was published as The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People (1977)^[16].  The Gmelchs’ return to Ireland in 2011 to look at how Irish Traveller culture had changed was the subject of an acclaimed two-part Irish TV documentary called “Unsettled – from Tinker to Traveller”^[17], and their book Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life (Indiana)^[18].

With filmmaker Dennis Lanson, Gmelch has produced two films related to the remote Newfoundland fishing community of Bay de Verde where he conducted research between 2018 and 2020. The first film, “A Year in the Field,”^[19] looks at the research of a young Estonian anthropologist studying climate change in Newfoundland (2020) and is now distributed by Documentary Educational Resources (DER).  The second film, “The Village at the End of the Road,” examines the aftermath of the collapse of Newfoundland’s cod fishery and its impact on the community.  It is soon to be broadcast on CBC.  And as already noted, the Gmelches were themselves the subject of a two-part Irish film “Unsettled - From Tinker to Traveller”^[20] that looked at their return to the Travelling community in Ireland forty years after their initial research.^[21]

In the Field: The Work and Life of Anthropology. (with S. Gmelch) University of California Press, 2018

Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City. 6/e. (with P. Kuppinger). Waveland Press, 2018

Playing with Tigers: A Minor-League Chronicle of the Sixties. University of Nebraska Press. 2016

Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life (with S. Gmelch).Indiana University Press, 2014

Tasting the Good Life: Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley. (with S. Gmelch). Indiana University Press. 2011

Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime. University of Nebraska Press, 2006

Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball. University of Nebraska Press, 2006

In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People (with J. Weiner). 2/e University of Nebraska Press. 2006

Behind the Smile, the Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism.  Indiana University Press. 2003

Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball.  Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001

The Parish Behind God's Back: History and Culture in Rural Barbados (with S. Gmelch) The University of Michigan Press, 1997

Double Passage: The Lives of Caribbean Migrants, Abroad and Back Home.  The University of Michigan Press, 1992     

Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology (with W. Zenner).  St. Martin’s Press. 1980.

J.M. Synge: In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara (with A. Saddlemyer). Dublin: O'Brien Press; New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. 1980.

To Shorten the Road: Folktales from Irish Travelling People (with B. Kroup).  Toronto: Macmillan; Dublin: The O'Brien Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press. 1977.

The Irish Tinkers: Urbanization of an Itinerant People. New York: Cummings Press /Addison-Wesley, 1977.  Japanese translation published in 1994 by Gendai Shokan, Tokyo.