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This study examines the role of modern sports in constructing national identities and the way leaders have exploited sports to achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The book focuses on the development of national sporting cultures in Great Britain and the United States, the particular processes by which the rest of Europe and the world adopted or rejected their games, and the impact of sports on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Teams competing in international sporting events provide people a shared national experience and a means to differentiate “us” from “them.” Particular attention is paid to the transnational influences on the construction of sporting communities, and why some areas resisted dominant sporting cultures while others adopted them and changed them to fit their particular political or societal needs. A recurrent theme of the book is that as much as they try, politicians have been frustrated in their attempts to achieve political ends through sport. The book provides a basis for understanding the political, economic, social, and diplomatic contexts in which these games were played, and to present issues that spur further discussion and research.
The period between 1870 and 1920 was one of the most dynamic in American history. This era witnessed the invention of the automobile, the establishment of women's suffrage, and the opening of the Panama Canal. While a time of great advancement, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were also periods of uncertainty as Americans coped with corrupt politicians, unchecked big business, and a vast influx of immigrants. SR Books offers a new approach to this time period in its book The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This volume looks at the experiences of 13 people who contributed to the shaping of American culture and thought during this period. These concise accounts are written by leading historians and give students an intimate view of history. This is an excellent text for courses in American studies.
America's national pastime has been marked from its inception by bitter struggles between owners and players over profit, power, and prestige. In this book, the first installment of a highly readable, comprehensive labor history of baseball, Robert Burk d
This book presents essential, readable, and provocative documents and essays that illuminate the American sporting experience from a variety of viewpoints. A volume in the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series, it is designed to encourage critical thinking about history. The documents are primary sources, selected for how they illustrate major developments in the rise of sport, and often, for how they illuminate the accompanying essays. They include government reports, court cases, contemporary newspaper articles, diary entries, and advertisements for athletic equipment. The essays were chosen to cover broadly the field of sport history, based on the particular significance of each essay to our understanding of sport history as well as the quality of the writing, research, and analysis. Introductions and headnotes for the readings provide context to help students better understand the material. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.
Environmental history has traditionally told the story of Man and Nature. Scholars have too frequently overlooked the ways in which their predominantly male subjects have themselves been shaped by gender. Seeing Nature through Gender here reintroduces gender as a meaningful category of analysis for environmental history, showing how women's actions, desires, and choices have shaped the world and seeing men as gendered actors as well. In thirteen essays that show how gendered ideas have shaped the ways in which people have represented, experienced, and consumed their world, Virginia Scharff and her coauthors explore interactions between gender and environment in history. Ranging from colonial...
Many Americans know more about the stadiums that loom over their cityscapes or college campuses than they do about any other aspect of the nation’s geography. Stadiums serve as iconic monuments of urban and university identities. Indeed, the power of sport in modern American culture has produced ‘sportscapes’—landscapes literally shaped by their devotion to athletic competition. Curiously, given the importance of the secular cathedrals in American culture, historians have paid little attention to these edifices. The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport seeks to remedy that oversight. This book will analyze stadiums from a variety of perspectives, paying s...
Discusses the ideology of baseball, professional baseball and urban politics, politics, ballparks, and the neighborhoods, social reform, and baseball as a source of social mobility.
This book examines the importance of California - a socio-cultural, economic and political powerhouse - in the history of modern sport. It argues that California has had a profound influence, for better or worse, on the way that not only America but also the wider world plays sport and spends money to watch others play. The book traces the history of sport in California from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and looks at how the state’s historical development, its climate, and its unique racial and ethnic demographics have influenced sport at the elite level and in the wider community. It considers the importance of spatial politics and cultural citizenship in the development of C...
Professional baseball is full of arcane team names. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, owe their nickname to the trolley tracks that honeycombed Brooklyn in the early 1880s. (Residents were "trolley dodgers.") From the Negro Leagues, there were the Pittsburgh Crawfords (sponsored early by the Crawford Bath House and Recreation Center); from the minors, the Tucson Waddies (slang for cowboy) and, later, the Montgomery Biscuits (for the would-be concessions staple); from overseas, the Adelaide, Australia, Bite (a shark reference but also a pun for bight) and the Bussum, Netherlands, Mr. Cocker HCAW (the sponsoring restaurant chain, followed by the acronym for the official team name, Honkbalclub Allan Weerbaar). This comprehensive reference book explains the nicknames of thousands of major and minor league franchises, Negro League and early independent black clubs, and international teams--from 1869 through 2011.
This multidisciplinary collection of essays by some of Europe's foremost Americanists deals with the United States as an island nation. America's trade policies, its foreign military ventures, its humour and its literature are all marked by the country's paradoxical desire to withdraw from the wider world beyond its oceans, while yet serving as its exemplar. The essays, covering aspects of legal and political studies, history and literature, probe the intersection between the national and the international As such they constitute an important contribution to the study of America's self-definition.