Smith, Ronald A. Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, and the Crises in Penn State Athletics. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xiii+259. Notes, index. $95.00 hardcover, $21.95 paperback. Reviewed by Colleen English Before I begin the review, I want to mention my ties to Penn State. For nearly a decade, as both…
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…
Anderson, Ryan K. Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv+220. Notes, photos, images, appendix, and index. $27.95 paper. Reviewed by Russ Crawford My first review for Sport in American History was of a book about the…
By Kate Aguilar “There is power in looking.” “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’” ~ bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). On May 20, former NBA player Etan Thomas boarded a crowded train and…
This blog post is a personal reflection of how I approached my class, “American Sport Since 1900” described in a previous post. For those of you unable (or unwilling!) to read the previous post, I will sum up. Our class was organized around the assertion that one can tell a lot about a society through…
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…
As part of ESPN’s 30 for 30, O.J.: Made in America examines O.J. Simpson’s movement through the American cultural, political, and social landscape of the past five decades. The five-segment documentary explores the significances of race, gender, celebrity, and violence in Simpson’s football career and later criminal trial. The Sport in American History reviewed all five parts…
As part of ESPN’s 30 for 30, O.J.: Made in America examines O.J. Simpson’s movement through the American cultural, political, and social landscape of the past five decades. The five-segment documentary explores the significance of race, gender, celebrity, and violence in Simpson’s football career and later criminal trial. The Sport in American History blog will be reviewing all…
As part of ESPN’s 30 for 30, O.J.: Made in America examines O.J. Simpson’s movement through the American cultural, political, and social landscape of the past five decades. The five-segment documentary explores the significances of race, gender, celebrity, and violence in Simpson’s football career and later criminal trial. The Sport in American History blog will…
Sport in American History 