By Wesley R. Bishop and Andrew McGregor The smoke and ash of Baltimore has cleared in the magical land of cable news. With protests in Cleveland underway, the short attention span of corporate media discourse has found another tragedy to focus on, with many talking heads treating yet another “isolated” incident of police brutality as…
This Fall I’m teaching a new course. I really enjoyed teaching the second half of the U.S. history survey last fall, so I’m thrilled to be back in the classroom. The class is called “The Black Athlete” and is a regular offering in the African-American Studies program here at Purdue. I’ve been assigned to teach it…
Just over one year ago, in a smoky bar after one too many beers, I caved. For the better part of two years, my friend and colleague Trevor Burrows had been encouraging me to start a group blog on sports. He’d become a contributor to Religion in American History and a frequent reader of U.S.…
Starting on July 23, 1967, and lasting for five days, several blocks in the 12th street area of Detroit were the scene of one of the deadliest, costliest, and most transformative urban uprisings in American history. Forty-three people died, 2,509 buildings were looted and destroyed, and the destruction cost some $36 million in insurable property…
In my last post, I looked at the first game of American Football played in Ireland in Croke Park in 1953 and the Irish reaction to this most American of sporting endeavours. In this post, I will examine the arrival of the skateboard as a mass-market product in Ireland in the late 1970s, as part…
I’m going to be doing a bit of “thinking out loud” in this post. It’s an extension of a Twitter conversation I had with Paul Putz about a month ago. We were talking about college sports teams in predominantly rural states as a way for their residents “to explain ourselves to other Americans” as well as…
By Guest Contributor David Toms In Ireland, when people think of the connections between the America and Ireland, most often their minds will turn to the role of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in Irish emigrant communities, or perhaps to first, second and third and multi-generation Americans who played baseball, basketball, and American football.[1] Rarely do Irish…
Jerry Tarkanian put the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on the map. The Runnin’ Rebels former coach, who died yesterday at age 84, was the architect of a basketball powerhouse that established UNLV as a national brand. Tarkanian and UNLV, followed the example of other major universities and used sports as an important method of public relations…
By Robert Gudmestad Even if you are a casual fan of professional football, chances are that you have seen some type of militaristic display during an NFL game. The Super Bowl, for instance, is saturated in patriotic festivities and each of the thirty-two teams has a Salute to Service game during the regular season. It wasn’t…
By Wesley R. Bishop Any notion that the United States was in a “post racial” society ended last summer. Preceded by the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, the high profile murders of unarmed black civilians returned with the shooting of Michael Brown. Then the deaths of John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and Eric…
Sport in American History 