By Andrew D. Linden Dissertations are hard. While writing a long piece of sport history, you uncover many stories about events of the sporting past, narratives of individual heroics on and off the playing fields, and many pieces of important contextualization. Yet, eventually you must decide what stays and goes. In my dissertation, I analyze…
By Michael T. Wood As 2015 comes to a close, we are entering the home stretch of the college football postseason. By the end of the day (or in the first moments of the New Year), thirty-one of the record forty bowl games will be completed, including the two semifinal games of the College Football…
By Leslie Heaphy Baseball is still America’s national pastime. You may not agree with me but there is much evidence to support this belief. Just look at the number of new books that came out in 2015 alone. Every day articles are written about the past, present and future of the game. Numerous sites exist…
By Mercedes Townsend In the same way defenders utilizing a “full court press” strategy limit the progression of their opponents across the court, hegemonic gender norms and expectations have historically and continuously stifled the progress of women’s basketball. Despite the gains of storied programs such as the UConn Huskies and University of Tennessee Lady Vols,…
By Cat Ariail At the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago, Illinois, Carlota Gooden, a twenty-two year-old Panamanian sprinter descended from Barbadian canal workers, won two silver medals and a bronze. Her performances in the 100-meter sprint, 4×100-meter relay, and 60-meter dash entered her name in the official records of international track, a permanent inscription that…
by Craig Forrest, Guest Contributor Football played a crucial role, it appears, in the most recent student protests at the University of Missouri. Over the past few months, several incidents of racial taunting have been reported by African-American students on campus. The president of the Missouri Students’ Association described being called a “nigger” by passengers…
By Cat Ariail The New York City Marathon, scheduled for November 1, 2015, represents the premier event on the fall running calendar. Last year, women composed 20,572 of the 50,896 entrants, a number that correlates with the twenty-first century rise in female participation in distance running events. While men still are the majority of marathon…
By Colleen English In the IAAF World Championships, the Olympic Games, and a host of other international, national, and local track and field meets, women compete in a wide variety of events, including middle- and long-distance races, like the 1500-meter, 10,000-meter, and the marathon. However, the inclusion of women in these races has a long…
By Adam Park I recently tried to explain to a four-year-old why I whimpered in pain when she “honked” my nose. It was not easy. Boxing, I said. A friend punched me there several times because we were playing a game. She looked perplexed. But we weren’t fighting, I quickly qualified, we were just having…
By Brad J. Congelio The city of Boston’s garbage is the city of Los Angeles’s treasure, as it were. For fans of the Olympics, watching the bidding mess unfold in Boston was saddening. For years, the United States Olympic Committee was at odds with the International Olympic Committee over what many in the Olympic family…
Sport in American History 