By Russ Crawford The WFA held their championships on July 23rd and 24th at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. The stadium, located just across the street from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, also hosts the annual NFL Hall of Fame game, and so the women were playing on a big…
Elsey, Brenda and Nadel, Joshua. Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pp. 271. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paperback. Reviewed by Russ Crawford Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel have added an important volume to women’s sport history with Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin…
Schultz, Jaime. Women’s Sports: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 243. Notes, bibliography, and index. $16.95 paperback. Reviewed by Cat Ariail As scholars of women’s sport well know, studying women’s sports tells one about much more than women’s sports. With Women’s Sports: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jaime Schultz…
In its ranking of the top 100 North American athletes of the twentieth century, ESPN’s SportCentury included only 8 women. The recognition of only 8 female athletes (and 3 horses) demonstrates the all-too-frequent tendency to leave female sporting contributions out of the conversation. The Sport in American History’s three part-series, Top Ten Historically Significant Women…
In total, we collected 73 entries, including 70 athletes/coaches and 3 teams. These contributions came from scholars, casual readers, and one sport history classroom. This produced myriad descriptions of prominent female athletes from around the world and from many different sports. Below is a recap of Part I and Part II. Part I recognized 50…
Welter, Jen. Play Big: Lessons in Being Limitless from the First Woman to Coach in the NFL. New York: Seal Press, 2017. vii+266. Acknowledgements. Reviewed by Russ Crawford Jen Welter has been the first woman to do many things. She was a member of the first women’s football team to win an International Federation of…
Inspired in part by ESPN’s 1999 SportCentury, which in its ranking of the top 100 North American athletes of the twentieth century included only 8 women, we asked contributors to help recognize the important–and often overlooked–contributions of women in sport history. Readers and scholars were asked to provide “top ten” lists of historically significant women…
By Katie Taylor In 2015, the Arizona Cardinals broke new ground in the NFL by hiring Jen Welter as a training camp assistant coach, the first woman to hold such a position. Less than a year later the Buffalo Bills hired Kathryn Smith as a full-time, quality control-special teams coach, though she unfortunately lost this…
Building off of our recent series, The Life and Legacy of Muhammad Ali Blog Series, the Sport in American History blog is happy to announce a new series titled Title IX at 45. On June 23, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, which included Title IX. This law, which…
Shattuck, Debra A. Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. xiii +307. Appendices, notes, bibliography and index. Clothback $25.95. Reviewed by Leslie Heaphy Debra Shattuck knocks it out of the park with her first book. Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers fills a huge void in sports literature regarding women…
Sport in American History 