Sport Historiography Research Articles

Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics , and: Barney Ross (review)

PAUL TAYLOR. Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics. Brighton and Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 268.DOUGLAS CENTURY. Barney Ross. Jewish Encounters. New York: Nextbook-Schocken, 2006. Pp. xvii + 216.Neither Paul Taylor's look at Jewish participation in - and problems with - the modern Olympic Games nor Douglas Century s sympathetic biography of the boxer Barney Ross appreciably advances serious study of the intersection between modern Jewish life and the world of sports. Over the past decade or so, significant strides have been made in raising Jewish sports books beyond the apologetic and celebratory tomes that for so long characterized this area of research. Rather than listing Jewish sports achievers and champions or recounting those heroes most famous performances, the better works now appearing in this field use the metaphor of Jewish sports involvement to more fully understand the course of Jewish emancipation, the processes of group acculturation, gender differences, and the state of traditional Jewish practices and mores under conditions of freedom.Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sports and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1992) offered the first worthy synthetic treatment of athleticism s impact upon America Jewish immigrants and their children, focusing primarily on the games Jews played and the bouts fought in this country's great cities. Steven A. Riess' compendium Sports and the American Jew (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998) brought together a wealth of thoughtful scholarly articles, including the best piece written on what the trials and travails of the baseball slugger Hank Greenberg say about American Jewish status and self-image. More recently, Jack Kugelmass s collection, Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship (Champlam, Ill.), and Michael Brenner's edited volume Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln, Neb.), both from 2006, asked comparable , insightful questions about what sports activity tells us about level of Jewish integration in the modern world. Concomitantly, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is taking a close look at how women s roles were affected and defined through the athletic realm. And I will immodestly add my own work , Judaism's Encounter with American Sports (Bloommgton, Ind., 2005). Unfortunately, Taylor and Century's books do not follow through on their promises to address many of these more complex and substantive issues comprehensively.Jews and the Olympic Games is the more disappointing of the two works. Taylor makes the obvious point that those with nefarious political ends have frequently exploited these international youthful gatherings that supposedly were to be venues for fair play and the promotion of understanding among peoples. As Taylor is clearly concerned with the tragic fate that world Jewry suffered in the past century, predictably the Berlin Olympiad of 1936 looms largest in his analysis. Accordingly, he recounts in substantial detail the oft-told saga of Hitler's attempt at propaganda victories and the victimization of Jewish athletes - both those who were barred from the German squad in violation of tacit international sports protocols and those American Jews denied their chances at Olympic glory - because their country's sports officials, many of whom were anti-Semites themselves, did not want to embarrass the Fuhrer with the sight of Jews on the victory stand. The 1972 Munich Games also occupy much of Taylor's attention as he reminds readers of the horrific political statement that Palestinian terrorists made when they tried to advance their cause on the international stage through the murder of eleven Israeli athletes.But Taylor wants to do more than to speak through sports of Jewish marginality in the pre-Holocaust world and of the unfavorable position Israel today occupies geopolitically. Writing in a triumphalist vein - so reminiscent of the old great Jews in sports historiography - he seeks to answer retrospectively the victimizers of Jews through recounting sagas of those who, through athletic excellence, put the lie to Hitler's racist-athlete theories. …

Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa

The intent of this essay is twofold. First, to reflect on the emergence, development and sociohistorical positioning of rugby league in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is broached by locating the game within the contested presence of particular sporting codes as they relate to constructions of national identity. In doing so it explores the historical development and resonance of the game within the contested sociocultural terrain of New Zealand sport space. Second, I seek to establish a provisional agenda to explore the historical, social and cultural significance of the game which to date has been at the outer margins of both popular and scholarly sport historiography in New Zealand.

For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (review)

Reviewed by: For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838–1895 Russell Field (bio) Nancy B. Bouchier. For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838–1895 McGill-Queen’s University Press. x, 214. $39.95 In the last twenty years, the historiography of sport in Canada has been dominated by Alan Metcalfe's work on nineteenth-century organized sport and Bruce Kidd's examination of sport and physical activity in the interwar years. Nancy Bouchier's For the Love ofthe Game is an excellent extension of the former and an important chronological precursor to the latter. In [End Page 452] exploring the ideological realities of amateurism in small-town nineteenth-century Ontario, Bouchier examines male athletes in three sports - cricket, baseball, and lacrosse - played during civic holiday celebrations in two local settings (Woodstock and Ingersoll) between 1838 and 1895. Through the 'amateur code' and its associated values, social reformers sought to address the perceived problems of feminization, crime, and delinquency among male youth. Associated as it was with respectable English society, cricket both lacked broad participant appeal and offered little opportunity for social reformers. By the mid-1860s baseball was the most popular summer sport in Ontario. But as civic boosterism became an increasingly important component of local sport, the effectiveness of amateur ideology was undermined. Baseball's turn to a commercial spectacle in the 1870s effectively ended Woodstock's and Ingersoll's ability to compete with larger centres such as London, Guelph, and Toronto. The booming popularity of lacrosse between 1870 and 1890 owes much to its value to civic boosters and social reformers. In both Ingersoll and Woodstock, 'lacrosse arrived in town as the first wave of local baseball mania floundered ... That lacrosse had none of the stigma associated with cricket helped its appeal to urban boosters and sport reformers alike.' Lacrosse and other holiday sporting events were organized by the local amateur athletic associations (AAAs), formed in Woodstock in 1884 and in Ingersoll five years later. These associations connected the towns to the reform currents that swept across Canada in the late nineteenth century. In sport, this agenda was championed by the Montreal AAA, founded in 1881. The predominantly white, Protestant middle-class men who ran these clubs 'believed that they could lead local male youth to develop respectable values that would help them along life's journey and that the success of local lacrosse teams would be the town's success as well.' The reality of the amateur code was that it was as exclusionary as it was prescriptive and offered social uplift to only a segment of society. However, the 'town sanctioning of amateur sport clubs for the running of local civic holiday events is an important key to how the amateur movement diffused throughout urban Canada.' The AAA planning of civic holiday celebrations had unintended consequences. While 'local amateur athletics were intended to keep holiday events locally focused, AAA-run holiday games in Ingersoll and Woodstock relegated local people to the spectator stands and created a tremendous gap between townspeople and amateur athletes.' As a distinctly male realm celebrating codified sports, amateurism precluded women's participation while many traditional events (e.g., slippery pigs, greased poles) were eliminated from the program. Despite the AAAs' influence, Bouchier claims that 'one can see reform ideas falling quite short of the mark.' As sporting events became commercial ventures, a number of 'oppositional' practices [End Page 453] crept in - including rowdiness (both on the field and off), drinking, betting, and game-fixing. Bouchier addresses issues of class, gender, and community formation. However - from a gender perspective, for example - she goes no further than to suggest that organized sport was male and that female participation was limited to the 'private sphere' (e.g., preparing food for cricket banquets). While true, it is an insight that has been made elsewhere. Indeed, this book is in many ways a fleshed-out version of Bouchier's important 1994 contribution. Her demographic portrait of AAA executives and their ideological motivations, as well as the lived negotiation between hegemonic ideal and local practice, are all components of this earlier article. Despite this...

Sport Historiography in Europe: A Comparative Perspective and Heuristic Model

Sport Historiography in Europe: A Comparative Perspective and Heuristic Model

The Historiography of American Sport

The Historiography of American Sport Steven A. Riess Steven A. Riess Steven A. Riess is Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Sport History and is the author of City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports and Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar OAH Magazine of History, Volume 7, Issue 1, Summer 1992, Pages 10–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/7.1.10 Published: 01 June 1992