Bowman, Paul. Mythologies of Martial Arts. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 210. $39.95 paperback. Reviewed by Wesley R. Bishop Was the recent Marvel and Netflix show Iron Fist racist? How do we define cultural appropriation and orientalism in cultural studies, especially when cultural productions deal with popular representations of other cultures? What does…
Last night NBC aired the Closing Ceremony of the Rio Olympics, officially ending the Games of the XXXI Olympiad. The contributors to Sport in American History watched many of the 306 athletic events over the past 19 days with enthusiasm and interest. This week on the blog we offer our thoughts and reflections as both scholars…
Sotomayor, Antonio. The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. 330. 14 photographs, 2 illustrations, 2 maps, 2 tables, index. $60.00 hardcover. Reviewed by Wesley R. Bishop The world of sports and the world of politics are never far apart. Following each other…
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…
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…
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 