By Hunter Hampton College football is the most powerful sport in America. I am serious. College football holds more power than the NFL, NBA, PGA, etc. It is not that it owns a day of the week, or its TV revenue, or its number of teams. I’m confident in this argument because college football holds…
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,…
This post is a part of the series, “Sport History Rewind.” In this series, contributors revisit and reevaluate important texts to determine the degree to which their analyses, arguments, research, and influence resonate in the field today. Of particular concern is how well the works fit into historiographical debates and compare with more recent sport-related…
Colás, Yago. Ball Don’t Lie!: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. Pp. 226. Notes and Index. $79.50 cloth, $19.95 paperback, $19.95 ebook. Reviewed by Cat Ariail The Golden State Warriors-Cleveland Cavaliers Finals rematch has reinvigorated debates about whether Steph Curry has surpassed LeBron James as the best…
Hawkins, Billy; Cooper, Joseph; Carter-Francique, Akilah; Cavil, J. Kenyatta (eds.) The Athletic Experience at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Past, Present, and Persistence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 270. Index, About the Editors, About the Contributors. $75 hardcover, $64.49 e-book. Reviewed by Kristy L. McCray It is only appropriate to begin this post…
By Andrew D. Linden In early 2014, I received a Facebook notification about an upcoming initiative in sport history. Andrew McGregor posted a message to the North American Society for Sport History’s (NASSH) Grad Student Facebook page about a new academic blog he wished to launch. Promoted as a “place for junior faculty and graduate…
This post is a part of a new series, “Sport History Rewind.” In this series, contributors revisit and reevaluate important texts to determine the degree to which their analyses, arguments, research, and influence resonate in the field today. Of particular concern is how well the works fit into historiographical debates and compare with more recent…
Nathan, Daniel A., ed. Rooting for the Home Team, Sport, Community and Identity, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2013. 237 pages, $25 paperback. Reviewed by Peter Marquis This review originally appeared in “Aesthetics of Theory in the Modern Era and Beyond /Photographie documentaire,” Transatlantica: revue d’études américaines 2 (2014). Reproduced with permission from Transatlantica and…
By Andrew McGregor During the 1950s, the University of Oklahoma was the class of college football. The Sooners entered the fall of 1956 poised to make history. They were the defending national champions and had won thirty-consecutive games, one win shy of the team’s record-long winning streak. Though the schedule was not easy – it…
By Samantha White “In Washington D.C., Chicago, Detroit, and several other cities former Black hockey players have started youth hockey clinics and teams for youngsters who want to play. If you check around there may be someone with a team right in your area.” –Ebony Jr.!, March 1982 The intersection of sport history and sport…
Sport in American History 