Sport, History and Culture – serie

This book offers the first ever academic study of women’s cricket in Britain from its origins in the 18th century to the present day. It examines women’s cricket from grassroots to international level, in schools, universities, the workplace and clubs. The book draws on a wealth of new source material including player diaries and scrapbooks, club records and the records of the Women’s Cricket Association.Through use of oral history interviews with many former players, the book argues that women’s cricket was a site of feminism across its history, and an important source of empowerment to the women who participated in the sport. However, it also examines barriers to women’s participation, analyzing the persistence of opposition to women’s sport across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Overall, the book uses women’s cricket as a case study to highlight the existence of ongoing fundamental inequalities in the quantity and quality of women's leisure in contemporary Britain.

When German troops marched into Poland on 1 September 1939, this also affected sport – sometimes dramatically. Official propaganda no longer viewed football as a game that was played for fun, but one that could be instrumentalized for political goals and military strategy. Due to the unpredictability of the game, football did not appear to be well suited to such a purpose. However, as the sport was able to create a politically neutral space that offered exciting entertainment and an escapist distraction, it was eminently important for the dictatorship. Soldiers and the civilian population benefited from this, as did the National Socialist regime itself. Football was vital for the war effort and also helped to stablilize the system precisely because it was not a vehicle for political propaganda. In this edited volume, an international team of authors examines the development of football during the Second World War in a dozen European states. The volume concludes with essays on the representation of the topic in the arts and the media.

Franz Beckenbauer once observed that, in England, «war correspondents get their say whenever their team plays us.» In Crossing the Line?, Christoph Wagner surveys German football rivalry in the second half of the twentieth century as it was played out on the pitch and in the press. The Second World War undoubtedly cast a long shadow, framing the way in which matches were previewed and reported. The contrasting fortunes of the British and West German economies and British anxieties regarding German unification also impacted on sports coverage.An intense Anglo-German international football rivalry was forged against this backdrop. Newspaper readers often turn to the back page first and first impressions are important. Press coverage helped to shape what the English thought of the Germans and what they thought of themselves. Crossing the Line? – which includes an important chapter on the German media – focuses largely on the part played by English newspapers in generating a simplistic sporting commentary heavily dependent on stereotypes before it overreached itself in the mid-1990s and the German popular press began to hit back. As English football pundits often remind their viewers: «You can never underestimate the Germans».

Football and Fascism in the Iberian Peninsula offers a compelling look into how the Francoist and Salazarist regimes in Spain and Portugal used football as a tool for ideological control, national identity building, and propaganda. Drawing on rich archival sources and a comparative historical approach, Daniele Serapiglia and Juan Antonio Simón explore how fascist ideals permeated the sport—shaping its heroes, rituals, and media narratives—while also revealing football’s role as a space of resistance and contradiction. This book exposes the emotional power of football in shaping imagined communities and unveils how two Iberian dictatorships sought to mold society through the world’s most popular game.

How did the world’s most popular sport begin? How was the ancient family of pastimes called «folk football» transformed into a new codified game - «association football» - which attracted such large numbers of players and paying spectators? Gavin Kitching tackles the question through a strikingly original and deeply researched history of the game in one of its most passionate strongholds: the north-east of England. Making extensive use of previously neglected newspaper reports and other sources, he shows how, in just a few years of the 1870s and 1880s, soccer evolved from its origins as a collective scramble into a dispersed and intricate passing game, exciting and rewarding for players and spectators alike. But the booming popularity of football in the Victorian North-East also had deeply ambiguous consequences - for footballers, for the clubs for which they played, and for the local press which reported the game and further fuelled its popularity. Kitching analyses these ambiguities in chapters on the professionalization and commercialisation of elite soccer in Newcastle and Sunderland and in an account of the «shamateur» Northern League clubs of the Durham coalfield. A Fateful Love concludes by tracing these ambiguities through to the present day. The visual excitement and beauty that created professional football lives on, but the media–driven «commodification» which has marked it from its beginnings has now reached levels which raise profound concerns for the game’s future.

This book is the first major examination of the history of physical education in Irish primary and second level schools in the twentieth century. Set within the context of major international developments in the subject, it examines its state in these schools prior to the partition of Ireland in 1921. It assesses the reasons why physical drill’s status was reduced in the Irish Free State’s primary schools in the mid-1920s and accounts for the failure to fully implement the Sokol system in the following decade. Despite the efforts of a number of educationalists and those in the media to draw attention to the subject’s neglect, it was not until the late 1960s that concrete action was taken to provide compulsory physical education in what had become the Republic of Ireland. However, following the foundation of the National College of Physical Education in 1973, problems remained, with the country’s schools still lagging behind those in many other European nations in terms of curricular time given to the subject by the late 1990s. In Northern Ireland, treatment of physical education was more closely aligned to developments in other parts of the United Kingdom, but progress was also slow in many schools.

This book brings together a range of researchers to explore the growth and development of the women’s game in Britain and Ireland. They are active across a diverse range of fields, from historians and heritage practitioners, to those from the arts such as playwrights and documentary directors. This edited collection draws together both regional and national studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of the history of the women’s game in Britain and Ireland than has been possible before. Chapters in this book explore new findings around the development of key teams, players, and organisations, and in doing so enrich the historiography of the game.Often books on the history of football have taken a narrative approach focusing only on the research findings or ‘story’. This is of course important, but in this book the editors also wanted to reflect the ways in which research into the history of women’s football has been shared and explored within a range of spaces and communities. There is a huge untapped audience who want to engage with the history of the sport. By reflecting on previous arts/heritage-based projects we can explore new avenues regarding how academic research can be made accessible to the general public and in turn how arts/ heritage-based projects can inform academic research.

This edited volume proposes to revisit the development of recreational and professional sporting activities in the French capital between 1854 and 2024. It comprises fifteen chapters surveying the rich and multifaceted history of athletic practices in Paris, and constitutes the first comprehensive piece of scholarship exclusively dedicated to the relationship between sport, history, and culture in the City of Light.This collection articulates and emphasizes the sustained presence and impact of sports in Parisian lives for over a century and a half, at the same time as it encourages readers to think about sports as a form of cultural expression able to alter national, regional, and individual identity, in other words, as a form of entertainment able to shift our perception of leisure and spectatorship, an activity able to transform urban spaces and social norms. To this end, Sport in Paris proposes complementary perspectives, by not only addressing multiple sporting disciplines (tennis, football, boxing, etc.) but also stressing interdisciplinary approaches (history of the press, urbanism, health studies, literary geography, etc.).

This book is the first full-length academic study of sport in nineteenth-century Dublin. Drawing extensively from historical and archival material, it maps out the emergence and development of modern sport in the city as traditional pastimes were progressively replaced by formally organized games. It examines the initial role of Dublin University students in fostering such games among the city’s rapidly expanding middle classes and illustrates how commercial forces, sustained by a growing number of retailers and entrepreneurs, proved equally decisive in shaping new recreational habits. Crucially, it explores how the evolution of an urban and imperial British society as well as Irish customs and a renewal of cultural nationalism in late nineteenth-century contributed to fashioning the original and distinctive sporting scene which emerged in Victorian Dublin. This book also depicts a city at play, where an unremittable passion for games and excitement drove Dubliners to join sport clubs or congregate in the stands. Eventually, social class, gender, political allegiance and local pride were central to creating such sporting identities and, conversely, leisure activities reinforced one’s status within the community.

Public school education in the second half of the nineteenth century was completely dominated by classics and sport. Rejecting the view that these were competing strands resulting in friction between aesthetic scholars and athletic philistines, this book shows how classicism and athleticism were closely entwined. Using primary sources, such as school magazines and memoirs, it considers how classical ideas shaped the elite British male’s view of his place in the world and his attitudes to masculinity, gender, race, class and duty. At the heart of this process were a comparatively small number of classically-educated men who influenced the reorganisation and reform of games between 1850 and 1914 laying the foundations for modern sport. This book explores their overlapping social networks, and the ways in which they sometimes co-opted ancient history, as they tried to retain control of the sporting landscape and promote an ‘amateur ideal’ based on a past that never really existed.

This book offers a unique examination of women’s increasing involvement in sport during the period 1919-1939. Focusing primarily on sites of participation, it analyses where and how women accessed sport and their participation across class, age and marital groups. It also demonstrates the diverse ways in which sport was incorporated into women’s everyday lives, with particular emphasis on the important and yet often neglected area of informal participation, so fundamental to understandings of women’s sport. The unique combination of in-depth studies, drawing on the voices of the women themselves through oral testimonies, and the tracing of broad national and international trends, contributes to an innovative and comprehensive exploration of the evolution of women’s sports participation across Britain during this significant period.

This book was shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Prize 2013.While the relationship between amateurism and sport is well documented, the impact of this ethos on the professional coaches and trainers who directed and supported elite sporting performance has been entirely overlooked. This book explores the foundations of coaching and training practices and chronicles how traditional approaches to performance preparation evolved during the nineteenth century. Drawing on primary material to uncover the life courses of coaches and their families, the author argues that approaches to coaching replicated the traditional craft approach to skilled work. The advent of centralized, amateur-controlled governing bodies of sport created a significant shift in the coaching environment for professional coaches, meaning that individuals had to adapt to the master-servant relationship preferred by the middle classes. Cultural differences in the value accorded to coaching also contributed to a decline in the competitiveness of British athletes in the international arena. The author concludes by arguing that despite scientific advances, Edwardian coaching practices remained reliant on long-established training principles and that coaching practices in any period are inevitably an amalgamation of both tradition and innovation.

For the Koreans, no sport has surpassed football in terms of its popularity and national importance, from the Japanese colonization era onwards. However, its importance has developed over time as a result of unusual and agonizing historical events, including the tragic split between North and South Korea. This volume attempts to assess footballs changing political and cultural place in Korea over the course of the twentieth century, from the Japanese colonial period via the Korean War to the end of the Cold War. It analyses the development and diffusion of football in North and South Korea from the following angles: nationalism and regionalism, internationalism and globalism, patronage, and the Korean style of play. It particularly concentrates on the social meanings of the North Korean miracle in the 1966 World Cup and of South Koreas success in the 2002 tournament. The author shows that football in Korea has not only reflected changes in Korean society but helped to shape those changes.

Bringing together boxing writers from different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, this book offers a vital and original contribution to the understanding of this enduringly fascinating and controversial sport.This collected volume investigates what is at stake in boxing in the modern world by exploring different aspects of boxing culture and problematic concepts attached to the sport such as masculinity and violence. This approach implies input from different academic and creative disciplines including aesthetics, cultural studies, creative writing, anthropology, history, literature and sociology. The points of view of participants in boxing as a sport, amateur and professional, will also be incorporated. In this way, themes as different as what it feels like to receive a punch on the nose or the role of fist-fighting in traditional Russian folk customs will be explored.

Winner of the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2017 This book is a case study of an African-Caribbean-founded football club, Meadebrook Cavaliers, from the English East Midlands. Covering the years 1970 to 2010, it seeks to address the paucity of research on the British African-Caribbean male experience in leisure and sport as well as on the relationship between «race» and local-level football. The development of the club was intimately connected to wider changes in the social and sporting terrain. Based on a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the book examines the club’s growth over four decades, exploring the attitudes, social realities and identity politics of its African-Caribbean membership and the varying demands and expectations of the wider black community. In doing so, it shows how studies of minority ethnic and local football clubs can shed light on the changing social identities and cultural dynamics of the communities that constitute them.