Last night NBC aired the Closing Ceremony of the Rio Olympics, officially ending the Games of the XXXI Olympiad. The contributors to Sport in American History watched many of the 306 athletic events over the past 19 days with enthusiasm and interest. This week on the blog we offer our thoughts and reflections as both scholars…
By Brandon R. Byrd “Sylvio Cator from Haiti to see you.” On August 27, 1932, those seven words brought work at the United Press to a halt. At once, the sports reporters at the New York-based news agency strained their ears, listening for “the sinister booming of tom toms.” There were none. No matter, though.…
By Jorge E. Moraga Introduction: Your 2016 Baseball Hall of Famers… On July 27th, retired Major League Baseball (MLB) players George Kenneth “Ken” “Junior” “The Kid” Griffey Jr. and Michael Joseph “Mike” Piazza joined the ranks of baseball’s most elite club. In a near unanimous decision, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) voted in…
By Andrew McGregor Teaching online is intimidating, but gauging by the audience in my NASSH panel “Teaching Sport History in the Digital Era,” it is a topic that many of us want to learn more about. In this post, I want to build off some of the ideas offered in that panel, on this blog,…
By Noah Cohan, Guest Contributor “There hasn’t been an original joke, really—on the internet, sports related—in about two years” –DJ Gallo We live in the age of the Crying Jordan “thinkpiece,” and this is one. Like a lot of Twitter users, I have liked and retweeted many images featuring Michael Jordan’s sad face over the…
By Kate Aguilar “There is power in looking.” “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’” ~ bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). On May 20, former NBA player Etan Thomas boarded a crowded train and…
By Brandon R. Byrd, Guest Contributor What would it mean to live beyond the color line? To live unencumbered by race; by blackness? Black novelists have tackled these questions time and time again. Passing. Colorism. Tragic mulattoes. These are common tropes in black literature since the nineteenth-century. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man epitomizes this…
As part of ESPN’s 30 for 30, O.J.: Made in America examines O.J. Simpson’s movement through the American cultural, political, and social landscape of the past five decades. The five-segment documentary explores the significance of race, gender, celebrity, and violence in Simpson’s football career and later criminal trial. The Sport in American History blog will be reviewing all…
By Jonathan Silverman I came to the Doing Sport History in the Digital Present workshop last week as an American Studies scholar and may have left a sport historian. This proclamation only becomes relevant in the context of the aims of the DSH workshop, in which 15 participants from a variety of scholarly approaches and interests came…
By Frank Andre Guridy Sports arenas and stadiums seem to come and go at the whims of profit-seeking sports interests. Since the post-World War II period, cycles of stadium construction have produced costly state of the art facilities that are initially touted as architectural wonders or revenue generators, only to become abandoned white elephants after…
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