By Cat Ariail On November 9, I woke up and opened my computer, preparing to work on my dissertation. Yet the exercise immediately felt pointless. In the aftermath of the previous night’s developments, analyzing the 1951 Pan-American Games seemed both absurd and futile. With the nation’s democratic principles and diverse peoples under threat, academic nuance…
Ross, Charles K. Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016 Pp. 212. Notes, bibliography, and index. $84.50 clothback, $19.95 paperback, $19.95 e-book. By Andrew D. Linden At Super Bowl I, then known as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, the Green Bay Packers easily…
By Andrew McGregor Last night, amidst a mobilization of supporters — including hundreds of veterans — and against a looming deadline upon which the land they occupied would be “closed for winter,” the protestors at Standing Rock received good news. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied an important easement to Energy Transfer Partners, the…
Nathan, Daniel, Ed. Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 291. Notes, Contributors, Index. $24.95 paperback. Reviewed by Daniel Glen Hedrick “Here you go, hon.” The phrase was repeated over and over by my grandmother as she passed out meatball subs to anyone who looked her…
Foglio, Massimo with Ford, Mark. Touchdown in Europe: How American Football Came to the Old Continent. Published by the author (Foglio). 269 pages. Bibliography. $15.00 paperback. Reviewed by Russ Crawford Massimo Foglio, who is, according to his brief bio on the back of Touchdown in Europe: How American Football Came to the Old Continent, an…
By Andrew McGregor Spatial history has been slow to come to sport history. Although the spatial turn has been underway for several decades, changing how historians analyze, view, and present history, sports are often left out of major mapping projects. A quick look through the projects completed by the Stanford University Spatial History Project and the…
Curry, Graham, and Eric Dunning. Association Football: A Study in Figurational Sociology. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 192 + index. $148.00 hardback, $53.95 paperback. Reviewed by Zachary R. Bigalke It is natural to long for a concise and clear historical timeline, to be able to easily and definitively explain the chain of events that lead to…
Gerald R. Gems, Boxing: A Concise History of the Sweet Science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Pp. 343, notes, bibliography, and index, black and white photographs.$40.00 hardback. Reviewed by Mac Ross In Boxing: A Concise History of the Sweet Science, Gerald R. Gems provides one of the most robust and ambitious history of the…
By: Roberto José Andrade Franco Boxing has long been a sport for the lower-classes which, for most of its early history was illegal and practiced in secrecy to avoid arrests. However in the late 1800s there was a change in who practiced boxing. This shift came from a variety of reasons including a movement away…
Tenney, John Darrin. Baseball in Territorial Arizona: A History, 1863-1912. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016. Pp. 196. Bibliography, Notes, and 23 Photos. $29.95 paperback. Reviewed by Jorge Iber At the very start of his work, John Darrin Tenney describes for readers the extensive research conducted in order to produce this brief tome,…
Sport in American History 