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Sports History
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Sports History

Four Volume Set
Edited by:


July 2016 | 1 480 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

Sports history is no longer a marginal academic subject. It has now been recognised that sport is a significant cultural activity that matters to millions of people and ought to be studied by academic researchers. Correctly practised, sports history is a counter to nostalgia, myth and invented tradition. It can be considered the sports memory of a nation: without sports history there is sporting amnesia.

The respected editors of this reference collection have brought together the best and most challenging work in the field for the first time. Covering a wide range of sports, regions, debates, approaches and eras, Sports History is a truly comprehensive collection, divided across four themed volumes:

Volume One: An Unfinished Journey

Volume Two: More Than a Game

Volume Three: A Force for Good?

Volume Four: Flexible Boundaries

 
VOLUME ONE: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY
Wray Vamplew and Mark Dyreson
Introduction
Part One: Pioneers

 
John Rickards Betts
The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850–1900
Dennis Brailsford
Sporting Days in Eighteenth Century England
W.F. Mandle
Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century
Part Two: Inside and Outside the Archives

 
Douglas Booth
Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the Archive
Susan K. Cahn
Sport Talk: Oral History and Its Uses, Problems, and Possibilities for Sport History
Linda Borish and Murray Phillips
Sport History as Modes of Expression: Material Culture and Cultural Spaces in Sport and History
Part Three: Using Theory

 
Douglas Booth
The Consecration of Sport: Idealism in Social Science Theory
Wray Vamplew
Concepts of Capital: An Approach Shot to the History of the British Sports Club before 1914
Bob Stewart
The Nature of Sport under Capitalism and Its Relationship to the Capitalist Labour Process
Colin Howell
Assessing Sport History and the Cultural and Linguistic Turn
Part Four: Contextual Approaches

 
How to Read Historical Context

 
Eric Hobsbawm
Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914
How to Avoid Misreading Historical Context

 
Donald Kyle
“The Only Woman in All Greece”: Kyniska, Agesilaus, Alcibiades and Olympia
Part Five: Innovatory Approaches

 
 
How to Read the Media
Michael Oriard
Reading, Watching, and Listening to Football
How to Swim against the Currents of Context

 
Synthia Sydnor
A History of Synchronized Swimming
Part Six: Areas of Challenge: Emotion, Children and Eroticism

 
Emotion

 
Barbara Keys
Senses and Emotions in the History of Sport
Children

 
Wray Vamplew
Child Work or Child Labour? The Caddie Question in Edwardian Golf
Joyce Kay
A Blinkered Approach? Attitudes towards Children and Young People in British Horseracing and Equestrian Sport
Eroticism

 
Allen Guttmann
Spartan Girls, French Postcards, and the Male Gaze: Another Go at Eros and Sports
 
VOLUME TWO: MORE THAN A GAME
Part One: Gender

 
Elliott Gorn
“Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry
Pamela Grundy
From Amazons to Glamazons: The Rise and Fall of North Carolina Women’s Basketball, 1920–1960
Jaime Schultz
Caster Semenya and the “Question of Too”: Sex Testing in Elite Women's Sport and the Issue of Advantage
Part Two: Race and Ethnicity

 
Kendall Blanchard
Basketball and the Culture-Change Process: The Rimrock Navajo Case
Benjamin Rader
The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport
Mark Dyreson
Basketball and Magic in ‘Middletown’: Locating Sport and Culture in American Social Science
Part Three: Associativity

 
Stefan Szymanski
A Theory of the Evolution of Modern Sport
Klaus Nathaus
The Role of Associativity in the Evolution of Modern Sport: A Comment on Stefan Szymanski’s Theory
Part Four: Sport as Consumer Culture

 
Stephen Hardy
Where Did You Go, Jackie Robinson? Or, the End of History and the Age of Sport Infrastructure
Geraldine Biddle-Perry
The Rise of “The World’s Largest Sport and Athletic Outfitters”: A Study of Gamage’s of Holborn, 1878–1913
Part Five: Sport and Nation`

 
Barbara Keys
Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s
Andrew Morris
“I Can Compete!” China in the Olympic Games, 1932 and 1936
Mark Dyreson
The Republic of Consumption at the Olympic Games: Globalization, Americanization, and Californization
Part Six: Sport and International Relations

 
Peter Beck
The Relevance of the “Irrelevant”: Football as a Missing Dimension in the Study of British Relations with Germany
Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
Japan's Sports Diplomacy in the Early Post-Second World War Years
Matthew Taylor
Global Players? Football, Migration and Globalization
Part Seven: Sport and the First World War

 
Eliza Riedi and Tony Mason
‘Leather’ and the Fighting Spirit: Sport in the British Army in World War I
Wray Vamplew
Exploding the Myths of Sport and the First World War: A First Salvo
Iain Adams and John Hughson
“The First Ever Anti-Football Painting”?
 
VOLUME THREE: A FORCE FOR GOOD?
Part One: The Civilizing Process: The British Debate

 
Tony Collins
History, Theory and the “Civilizing Process”
Graham Curry, Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard
Sociological versus Empiricist History: Some Comments on Tony Collins’s ‘History, Theory and the “Civilizing Process”’
Part Two: Football Hooliganism

 
Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy, John Williams and Joseph Maguire
Football Hooliganism in Britain before the First World War
Robert Lewis
Football Hooliganism Revisited: A Belated Reply to Patrick Murphy, Eric Dunning and Joseph Maguire
Part Three: The Civilizing Process: America

 
Allen Guttmann
Sports Spectators from Antiquity to the Renaissance
Donald Kyle
Spectators and Crowds in Sport History: A Critical Analysis of Allen Guttmann’s Sports Spectators
Melvin Adelman
A Modernist’s View
Part Four: Opposition to Sport

 
David W. Brown
Criticisms against the Value-Claim for Sport and the Physical Ideal in Late Nineteenth Century Australia
John Bale
Anti-Sport: Victorian Examples from Oxbridge
G.K. Peatling
Rethinking the History of Criticism of Organised Sport
Part Five: The Dark Side

 
Peter Mewett
Discourses of Deception: Cheating in Professional Running
Steven A. Riess
Only the Ring Was Square: Frankie Carbo and the Underworld Control of American Boxing
Mike Huggins
Lord Bentinck, the Jockey Club and Racing Morality in Mid-Nineteenth Century England: The “Running Rein” Derby Revisited
 
VOLUME FOUR: FLEXIBLE BOUNDARIES
Part One: As Others See Us

 
Malcolm MacLean
Cracks in the (Self-Constructed?) Ghetto Walls? Comments on Paul Ward’s ‘Last Man Picked’
Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young
Sport in Modern European History: Trajectories, Constellations, Conjunctures
Joe Maguire
Common Ground? Links between Sports History, Sports Geography and the Sociology of Sport
Stefan Szymanski
Economists and Sports History
Ken Foster and Guy Osborn
Dancing on the Edge of Disciplines: Law and the Interdisciplinary Turn
Part Two: Time and Space

 
Clive Forster
Sport, Society and Space: The Changing Geography of County Cricket in South Australia 1836-1914
Jack Anderson
Village Greens, Commons Land and the Emergence of Sports Law in the UK
Part Three: Modernisation

 
Allen Guttmann
From Ritual to Record
Colin Howell
Of Remembering and Forgetting: From Ritual to Record and Beyond
Susan Brownell
The Problems with Ritual and Modernization Theory, and Why We Need Marx: A Commentary on From Ritual to Record
Part Four: Borderlands

 
Colin Howell
Borderlands, Baselines and Bearhunters
Mark Dyreson
The Foot Runners Conquer Mexico and Texas: Endurance Racing, Indigenismo, and Nationalism’
Part Five: Sport as a Culture-Making Tool

 
Clifford Geertz
Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight
C.L.R. James
What Is Art?
Part Six: Sports History for Public Consumption

 
Murray Phillips
A Historian in the Museum: Story Spaces and Australia’s Sporting Past
Kevin Moore
Sport History, Public History, and Popular Culture: A Growing Engagement
Daryl Adair
Writing Sports History for “Non-Specialists”: A Reply to the Review Symposium on Adair and Vamplew's Sport in Australian History, and the State of Australian Sports History

A welter of searchable online databases can help scholars find their way through the increasing store of published sports history research. Still, a need exists for comprehensive, edited anthologies to assist researchers by pointing to influential works in the field. Eminent sports historians Mark Dyreson and Wray Vamplew provide such a guide in their four-volume collection of readings, “Sports History: Issues, Debates and Challenges”. By assembling these key articles, however, the editors have done more than that – they have also curated a collection that charts and reflects the major developments in sports history, reflecting the myriad approaches, questions, perspectives, debates and ‘turns’ in the sub-discipline. Keep this one handy.

Gary Osmond
President, Australian Society for Sports History

This four-volume set is a judicious selection and an essential reference for research and teaching about sports history. It has been assembled by two of our finest sports historians to provide the foundational scholarship and the key controversies in sports history and historiography. It will be of lasting value to scholars and students.

William W. Kelly
Professor of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University

This well set-out collection of readings provides the definitive guide to the major issues, debates and challenges that have engulfed sport history scholarship over the last six decades. Drawn from a wide variety of pre-eminent journals and a host of seminal books, the items are arranged under intuitive sub-headings that allow the reader to either read systematically or to browse on a special topic of interest. At first glance the list of contributors reads like a who’s who of the discipline, but on closer examination it is clear that the views of venerated academics are counter-pointed by the work of emerging young scholars from around the world. This makes the collection much more than a dry compendium. The compilation is, in fact, an animated, challenging and enlightening dialogue about ‘doing sports history’.

Rob Hess
Managing Editor, The International Journal of the History of Sport

This four volume work with papers from well-known academics will be a major contribution to the international field of sport history. It not only covers various time periods, movement cultures and groups but also focuses on theoretical and archival backgrounds, and unusual topics such as emotions and eroticism, international relations or sport history as public consumption. Through this wide approach it differs from other publications, and shows a very innovative character.

Annette R. Hofmann
President of ISHPES (International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport)

Vamplew and Dyreson expertly clearly demonstrate that the sport history world is one of plurality. They use material, drawn from publications across the globe, to show that there are different approaches, perspectives and interpretations. These volumes are essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature and development of the subject.

Professor Fan Hong
Asian Academic Editor, International Journal of the History of Sport