By Andrew McGregor During the 1950s, the University of Oklahoma was the class of college football. The Sooners entered the fall of 1956 poised to make history. They were the defending national champions and had won thirty-consecutive games, one win shy of the team’s record-long winning streak. Though the schedule was not easy – it…
Editor’s note: This is the second of two posts this week exploring the connections and intersections between sport history, sport heritage, and public history. These three fields do not always work together when studying and presenting the sporting past. We hope sharing different perspectives and overviews of the fields will help us forge conversations that…
C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. 256. 12 Illustrations, notes and index. $24.95 Hardcover. By Andrew McGregor In October 2014 I had lunch with Billy Mills. Though we keep in touch, I hadn’t seen him since 2011. He was on campus giving a talk — one similar to the…
By Andrew McGregor The NFL Combine is currently underway at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, IN. The annual event is billed as a showcase where players exhibit their talent and skills in front of scouts and team executives in hopes of increasing their draft stock. It is an important event for the league as it…
By Andrew McGregor This is one of two new posts today exploring race in the NFL. This piece looks at Whiteness, considering Peyton Manning as a Great White Hopes. Kate Aguilar’s post The Man in the Mirror: Black Culture, White Privilege, and Supermen in the Age of Cam Newton offers a contrasting view. Read in…
Guiliano, Jennifer. Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Pp. 194. Notes and Index. $80.00 cloth. $27.95 paper. Reviewed by Andrew McGregor Most Americans are familiar with the controversy surrounding American Indian mascots, best exemplified by the current pushback against the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Few,…
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…
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…
Sport in American History 