By Charles Westmoreland, Jr. If anything about professional wrestling can be called unusual, then the February 13, 1988 episode of Championship Wrestling fit that description. A one-hour production for the Memphis-based Continental Wrestling Association (CWA), Championship Wrestling aired every Saturday morning on WMC TV in Memphis and was syndicated in markets such as Nashville, Tupelo, Louisville,…
By Alex Parrish There are two topics to never bring up at a dinner party, so we’re told – politics and religion. Few things simultaneously unite and divide people quite like politics and religion. Yet Americans seem to have an innate passion for discussing and debating these topics, often vehemently. Most people are fine with…
By Wesley R. Bishop and Andrew McGregor This weekend the University of Missouri, or “Mizzou” as it’s commonly called, became the latest front in the ongoing national movement against racism. Following a string of steady and increasingly hostile acts of hate, Mizzou’s football players joined a campus wide protest, refusing to participate in athletic events…
In early October I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about a new oral history project aimed at collecting and preserving the stories of African Americans in Major League Baseball. The project was launched in 2013 by Dr. Daniel Durbin, the Director of the Annenberg Institute of Sport, Media and Society (AISMS) at…
By Andrew McGregor Tomorrow night the 2015 World Series begins with the Kansas City Royals hosting the New York Mets. For the first time in its 111 year history, this year’s World Series features two expansion teams. While for most baseball fans this is mostly a meaningless footnotes, it’s a reminder of how much the…
By Alexander Hyres In February, the Big Ten Conference held a lengthy discussion with faculty, administrators, and student-athletes about how to “keep education central to the mission of college sports.” Whether education has actually been the central to mission of college sports in the last one-hundred years is questionable; however, the discussion did produce a proposal…
Osmond, Gary and Murray Phillips, eds. Sport History in the Digital Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xii + 279. Notes, Index. $60 Clothback. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor Digital history and the digital humanities often seem like opaque buzzwords conceived by young, tech-savvy scholars trying to gain a foothold in an increasingly competitive academic…
This is part 3 in a series of posts that explore the questions and issues of preparing a sport history course. The first post introduced the course and discussed selecting books and other materials. The second post explored issues of organization and choosing what to include. This is the final post in the series. It…
This is the first of two posts on Baseball’s Unwritten Rules. The “unwritten rules” entail issues of masculinity and decorum. They’re often contradictory and at times fans, players, and former players in sports media disagree on what they really are. In this series we want to take a closer look at them and try to…
This is part 2 in a series of posts that explore the questions and issues of preparing a sport history course. The first post introduced the course and discussed selecting books and other materials. This post explores issues of organization and choosing what to include. The series’ final post will appear on July 20, and will…
Sport in American History 