Moore, Louis. We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021. Pp. 260. $24.95 paperback and e-book. Reviewed by Łukasz Muniowski Louis Moore’s We Will Win the Day is the first book in a new series from the University Press of…
White, Derrick E. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 303. Abbreviations, bibliography, endnotes, epilogue, illustrations, and index. $30 hardback. Reviewed by Bob D’Angelo. Jake Gaither coached his last college football game fifty years ago, but his impact…
Boli, Claude. Mohamed Ali. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. 303 pages + appendices. $11.05 Paperback. Reviewed by Peter Marquis This review first appeared in Transatlatnica. Re-posted with permission. Some say he is indeed the “greatest”, the best-known person on earth, ahead of Pélé or Michael Jackson [1]. From the sidewalks of big cities where peddlers sell posters…
Gems, Gerald R., ed. Before Jackie Robinson: The Transcendent Role of Black Sporting Pioneers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 324. Notes and index. $35 paperback. Reviewed by Christopher R. Davis In popular memory, one of the most significant historical developments in the twentieth-century United States, the civil rights struggle, is often reduced to…
By Cat Ariail “Indoor track, sport’s answer to the three-ring circus, springs full-grown from the winter much as Athena sprang fully-armed from the head of Zeus,” asserted Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule in 1958.[1] In a subsequent article, Maule suggested the sport “takes on a carnival air when the lineal descendants of the fleet cave man…
By Andrew D. Linden Amidst the ongoing Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in sport, highlighted by the recent protest led by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, many writers, pundits, and editorialists have looked back at the cultural peak of the 1960s “revolt of the black athlete” (See here, here, and here.) Many of the…
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…
Sport in American History 