The story of how, in 1947, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the 80-year-old segregation of America's major league baseball has been told many times. But no one told it better, or gave it more depth, than Jules Tygiel, who has died from cancer aged 59. As professor of history at San Francisco State University, Tygiel specialised in American labour and the 20th-century development of California. But his best work grew out of his love of baseball, instilled during his Brooklyn 1950s childhood, where he idolised the Dodgers in general and Robinson in particular, "because he integrated baseball ... I was not sure what this meant, but I knew it was wonderful."
The Dodgers were baseball's hapless losers, known to their fans as Dem Bums. They played in Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn's Flatbush section, where Tygiel's parents ran a small electrical-appliance shop. He was just six in 1955 when the Dodgers won their first World Series, but Tygiel learned a harder lesson about the reality of sport when, just two years later, the team abandoned Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles.
After graduating from Brooklyn College, Tygiel followed the Dodgers west as he earned his MA and PhD in history from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). After spells at two other universities, he began teaching at San Francisco State in 1978.
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy was published in 1983. Tygiel wove the story of Robinson - a four-sport star at UCLA and former army lieutenant, who was specially selected by Dodger general manager Branch Rickey for his historic role - with the histories of black sportsmen in baseball and in America. It was a cultural history of American integration, an area in which sport proceeded ahead of most of the rest of the country. The book was an immediate success, received the Robert F Kennedy award for writing on race relations, and has been in print ever since.
Tygiel saw baseball's integration as a mirror for that of the nation itself. As he wrote, describing the "Jim Crow" era for the encyclopedia Total Baseball: "The stain of racial segregation beclouded American society. Blacks and whites pursued separate and unequal lives not just in the south, but throughout the nation. Confronted by rigid barriers created by the 'color line', African-Americans forged their own institutions and culture, creating a world invisible to most whites, but nonetheless vibrant, innovative, and distinctive. Baseball offered one of the most dynamic examples of this phenomenon."
Tygiel was an enthusiastic, if modestly talented, player himself, and started, in 1981, one of the earliest fantasy baseball leagues. He edited The Jackie Robinson Reader (1992), and collected shorter pieces in Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (2002). Past Times, published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, is a wide-ranging work about the history and impact of baseball on America.
Often cited as the sport's foremost historian, Tygiel produced numerous introductions to other works, including a moving preface to the reissue of It's Good To Be Alive, the autobiography of Roy Campanella, the Dodgers' great catcher of the 1940s and 50s, himself the product of a mixed-race marriage. His introduction to Irwin Silber's Press Box Red (2003), the story of the Daily Worker's sport editor Lester Rodney, places Rodney as a key force in the battle for baseball's integration.
Beyond baseball, Tygiel's writings included A Spectacular Season (1992), a study of working men in San Francisco in the late 19th century, and The Great Los Angeles Swindle (1994), the history of CC Julian, a fraudster during the 1920s Los Angeles oil boom. His 2004 book, Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism, approached the late president's legacy by analysing the lingering effects of his policies on the country, the same sort of context that he had given to Jackie Robinson.
He lived long enough to see the 25th anniversary edition of Baseball's Great Experiment. Joe Morgan, broadcaster and Hall of Fame player, said "his book showed us exactly how we got to where we are." Tygiel is survived by his wife Luise Custer and two sons.
· Jules Everett Tygiel, historian and sports-writer, born March 9 1949; died July 1 2008
· This article was amended on Thursday September 4 2008. This obituary originally said Jules Tygiel was survived by his wife, Rose. His wife is Luise Custer; Rose Tygiel is his mother. This has been corrected