By Leslie Heaphy Having any discussion that involves female owners in the Negro Leagues has to begin with a discussion of Effa Manley, the only woman elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame (2006). But what many people do not realize is the women that came before and after Effa. From Olivia Taylor to…
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 Robert J. Lake Anyone for tennis? It’s that time of year again when our favourite racket sport suddenly re-emerges as a fashionable and engaging spectacle. While other sports, notably the popular North American team-games of football, basketball, hockey, and baseball, alongside their equivalents in Britain, notably soccer, rugby union, rugby league, and county cricket,…
By Daryl Leeworthy, Guest Contributor Today’s Fourth of July celebrations mark the 240th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, that moment when it became necessary for “one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The effects of independence, and quite what the effects on social and cultural habit actually…
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…
By Rwany Sibaja, Guest Contributor Last Friday, June 3rd, the United States Men’s National Team faced Colombia in the opening match of the 2016 Copa América at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. This is a special edition of the tournament – the “Centenario” – commemorating the 100th anniversary of the world’s oldest continental soccer competition.…
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…
Regalado, Samuel O., and Sarah K. Fields, eds. Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2014. Pp. ix+166. Notes, contributors, and index. $34.95 paperback Reviewed by Erica Zonder Sport is a multi-billion dollar industry, and college sport in particular generates staggering amounts of revenue. In 2011-12, the NCAA…
By Russ Crawford, Guest Contributor Fiona Skillen and Carol Osborne recently wrote about the use of oral history in sport history for The International Journal of the History of Sport. In their article they argued that the method should be more widely employed.[1] This post leans heavily on two telephone interviews that I had with…
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…
Sport in American History 