By Dunja Antunovic, Guest Contributor In the April 8, 2015, edition of CBS News, anchor Scott Pelley begins “If there is one thing more difficult than breaking into the NFL as a player, it’s breaking in as an official. There are only 119. And breaking in as a woman? Impossible. Until today’s announcement.” The camera cuts…
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…
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…
By Scott D. Strednak Singer, Guest Contributor I’m a fan of Tim Tebow and Lori “Lolo” Jones, but not for the reasons you may think. For many Americans, Tebow and Jones are standard-bearers of a “born-again” Christian subculture desperately trying to retain cultural relevancy in an era when moral exhortations and claims to righteousness are becoming…
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…
By Nick Sacco, Guest Contributor I was there on October 12, 2014. I was there, standing in the upper deck at Busch Stadium when Oscar Taveras, an emerging rookie outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, smacked a game-tying home run in the ninth inning of game 2 of the National League Championship Series. The Cardinals…
By Colleen English, Guest Contributor Colleen English is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Marshall University. She received a B.S. in Kinesiology from Penn State University (2009) and is working on completing her Ph.D. in Kinesiology (History and Philosophy of Sport) under Dr. Scott Kretchmar at Penn State. Her research interests center mainly…
By Murry Nelson, Guest Contributor Murry Nelson is a Professor Emeritus of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the history of basketball, and is the author of The National Basketball League: A History, 1935–1949 (2009) and Abe Saperstein and the American Basketball League (2013). He recently edited a multiple-volume encyclopedia on the history of…
Sport in American History 