Sports and Entertainment – serie

Between World War I and World War II, women flocked to Chicago’s parks, playgrounds, and clubs, becoming enthusiastic participants, players, and fans of the games of the time. Robert Pruter’s Modern Women and Sports in Interwar Chicago; 1918–1941, examines how the Windy City became home to advancements in women’s track and field, swimming, basketball, golf, speed skating, and softball. As a work of sport and urban history, Pruter’s text situates the vibrant world of women’s athletics within the context of interwar Chicago’s new infrastructure and support from its religious and cultural institutions, newspapers, and industrial and retail firms. Woven into this historical analysis are biographies of individual athletes, including Edith Cummings, the 1920s golf star who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Tidye Pickett, the first African American woman to compete in the Olympic Games. Modern Women and Sports in Interwar Chicago provides a detailed look at developments in the city, the rise of women’s sporting culture, and the lives and social contexts of the athletes who navigated gender norms while embracing more inclusive recreation and competition.

This volume covers the running boom of the early 1900s and the formation of the Irish, Italian and German running clubs in New York City, where for many the race served as a metaphor for their journeys to the US. It also looks at the contemporary role of corporate sponsorship.

The legendary voice of the New York Knicks, Giants, and Jets writes also of his years as a Syracuse football star and a track Olympian who was denied his chance to compete in the 1936 Olympics due to anti-Semitism in Berlin, where he was dropped from the 400 metre relay team.

This text tells the true story of Stylianos Kyriakides who, against all odds, entered and triumphed in the 1946 Boston Marathon. Kyriakides ran not just to win, but to draw the world's attention to his home country, Greece, which had resisted Nazi occupation and was torn apart by civil war.

Shaping College Football is the story of the intercollegiate gridiron sport in the years immediately after World War I when the game underwent monumental changes that transformed it into one of America's fundamental sporting attractions and a commercial entity that would be recognizable to any twenty-first century fan. Raymond Schmidt examines the many factors that were a part of college football's reshaping in the 1920s as universities became dependent upon the revenue being generated by football, and the sport increasingly became identified as a commercialized, big business activity. Offering the most detailed examination ever undertaken of college football's ""Golden Era,"" Schmidt covers issues ranging from the shift of power away from the game's pioneering schools, through the real evolution of forward passing, to stadium building and the decade-long struggle over the game's growing overemphasis that culminated in the legendary Carnegie Report of 1929.

On March 31, 1929, seventy-seven men began an epic 3,554-mile footrace across America that pushed their bodies to the breaking point. Nicknamed the ""Bunion Derby"" by the press, this was the second and last of two trans-America footraces held in the late 1920s. The men averaged forty-six gut-busting miles a day during seventy-eight days of nonstop racing that took them from New York City to Los Angeles. Among this group, two brilliant runners, Johnny Salo of Passaic, New Jersey, and Pete Gavuzzi of England, emerged to battle for the $25,000 first prize along the mostly unpaved roads of 1929 America, with each man pushing the other to go faster as the lead switched back and forth between them. To pay the prize money, race director Charley Pyle cobbled together a traveling vaudeville company, complete with dancing debutantes, an all-girl band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians, all housed under the massive show tent that Pyle hoped would pack in audiences. Kastner’s engrossing account, often told from the perspective of the participants, evokes the remarkable physical challenge the runners experienced and clearly bolsters the argument that the last Bunion Derby was the greatest long-distance footrace of all time.

Grundman presents readers with a portrait, the first of its kind, of Dolph Schayes - the star of the Syracuse Nationals basketball team during the 1950s and 1960s. Schayes may not have one of the most recognizable names in basketball history, but his accomplishments are staggering. He was named one of the fifty greatest players of all time by the NBA, and he held six NBA records, including one for career scoring, at his retirement. Grundman chronicles Schayes’s life from his early days as the child of Jewish Romanian immigrants, through his illustrious basketball career, first at New York University, then as part of the Syracuse Nationals. In writing about Schayes’s career, Grundman also reflects on many of the revolutionary changes that were happening in the professional basketball world, changes that affected not only Schayes and his contemporaries but also the essence of the sport.

Robinson takes readers on a globe-trotting tour that combines a historian’s insight with vivid personal memories going back to just after World War II. From experiencing the 1948 ""Austerity Olympics"" in London as a young spectator to working as a journalist in the Boston Marathon media center at the moment of the 2013 bombings, Robinson offers a fascinating first-person account of the tragic and triumphant moments that impacted the world and shaped the modern sport. He chronicles the beginnings of the American running boom, the emergence of women's running, the end of the old amateur rules, and the redefinition of aging for athletes and amateurs.With an intimate perspective and insightful reporting, Robinson captures major historical events through the lens of running. He recounts running in Berlin at the time of German reunification in 1990, organizing a replacement track meet in New Zealand after the disastrous 2011 earthquake, and the triumph of Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. As an avid runner, journalist, and fan, Robinson brings these global events to life and reveals the intimate and powerful ways in which running has intersected with recent history.

Leveling the Playing Field tells the story of the African American members of the 1969–70 Syracuse University football team who petitioned for racial equality on their team. The petition had four demands: access to the same academic tutoring made available to their white teammates; better medical care for all team members; starting assignments based on merit rather than race; and a discernible effort to racially integrate the coaching staff, which had been all white since 1898. The players’ charges of racial disparity were fiercely contested by many of the white players on the team, and the debate spilled into the newspapers and drew protests from around the country. Mistakenly called the "Syracuse 8" by media reports in the 1970s, the nine players who signed the petition did not receive a response allowing or even acknowledging their demands. They boycotted the spring 1970 practice, and Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, a deeply beloved figure on campus and a Hall of Fame football coach nearing retirement, banned seven of the players from the team. As tensions escalated, white players staged a day-long walkout in support of the coaching staff, and an enhanced police presence was required at home games. Extensive interviews with each player offer a firsthand account of their decision to stand their ground while knowing it would jeopardize their professional football career. They discuss with candor the ways in which the boycott profoundly changed the course of their lives. In Leveling the Playing Field, Marc chronicles this contentious moment in Syracuse University’s history and tells the story through the eyes of the players who demanded change for themselves and for those who would follow them.

African-American athletes have experienced a tumultuous relationship with mainstream white America. ""Glory Bound"" brings together 11 essays that explore this complex topic by sports studies scholar David K. Wiggins. In his writings, Wiggins recounts the struggle of black athletes to climb their ""own"" racial mountain - their struggle to fully participate in sport while maintaining their own cultural identity and pride. Wiggins examines other seminal moments that defined and changed the black athlete's role in white America, from the 19th century to the present: the personal crusade of Wendell Smith to promote black participation in organized baseball, the triumph of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and the proposed boycott of the Games, and the response of America's black press and community. ""Glory Bound"" demonstrates how the civil rights movement changed the face of American athletics and society forever. With the genesis of the black power movement in sport, Wiggins notes a significant shift in black - and white - America's attention to the African-American athlete. In his final and newest essay, he examines the writings of Edwin B. Henderson, the ""father of black sport history"", who wrote the first books on African-American involvement in sport.

Stadium construction has altered the physical landscape of many major metropolitan areas throughout North America and has had a profound psychological and economic impact on these urban centers. How athletic facilities have been constructed, from the ritual-centered beginning of stadium construction in ancient Greece to largescale construction of professional sports facilities in present day global centers, reveals a culture's values and priorities and how it defines its recreational needs. With in-depth analysis and research, Robert C. Trumpbour examines the political institutions, commercial entities, civic leadership, and media organizations that influenced new stadium construction. The author analyzes three significant recent historical periods: the Progressive Era when modern fireproof stadiums were first built; the late 1960s and early 1970s when multipurpose football stadiums were built in downtown areas to promote urban redevelopment; and the late 1990s when retro ballparks were built to employ novel measures for profiteering. Charting this evolution, Trumpbour convincingly argues that there has been a dramatic shift in the role of the media, one in which media access has emerged as a vital element in setting the ground rules for the stadium construction debate. Written in lucid, jargon-free prose, this book combines a detailed history of stadium construction with an analysis of current stadium issues that provides a rich, portrait of our cultural landscape.

How did a small Canadian regional league come to dominate a North American continental sport? Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 tells the fascinating story of the game off the ice, offering a play-by-play of cooperation and competition among owners, players, arenas, and spectators that produced a major league business enterprise. Ross explores the ways in which the NHL organized itself to maintain long-term stability, deal with its labor force, and adapt its product and structure to the demands of local, regional, and international markets. He argues that sports leagues like the NHL pursued a strategy that responded both to standard commercial incentives and also to consumer demands that the product provide cultural meaning. Leagues successfully used the cartel form - an ostensibly illegal association of businesses that cooperated to monopolize the market for professional hockey - along with a focus on locally branded clubs, to manage competition and attract spectators to the sport. In addition, the NHL had another special challenge: unlike other major leagues, it was a binational league that had to sell and manage its sport in two different countries. Joining the Clubs pays close attention to these national differences, as well as to the context of a historical period characterized by war and peace, by rapid economic growth and dire recession, and by the momentous technological and social changes of the modern age.

The winner of three gold medals in track at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Wilma Rudolph has been portrayed and remembered across a wide range of settings and sites over the past half-century. As an African American female born into poverty whose childhood disability left her temporarily unable to walk without the aid of a leg brace, Rudolph captured our attention then and continues to fascinate new generations of children and adults alike. The markers of Rudolph’s identity, joined with her athletic success, create a quintessential ragsto-riches tale, one repeatedly narrated over the decades.(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph explores the major episodes and sites of memory across the track legend’s life and death. Analyzing newspaper and magazine accounts, dozens of children’s books, and a television movie, among other materials, Liberti and Smith highlight the range of ways meaning was constructed around Rudolph and her accomplishments on the track. Rather than atraditional biography, this book unpacks the collective memories we create and share about the Olympian. A close reading of the stories that are remembered and circulated about Rudolph not only underscore the athlete’s agency but simultaneously minimize and even erase the ways in which racism and sexism impacted her life. The memorials honoring Rudolph tell us far more about the moment of their creation and the storytellers than they do about the track great.

In 1979, a group of women athletes at Michigan State University, their civil rights attorney, the institution’s Title IX coordinator, and a close circle of college students used the law to confront a powerful institution—their own university. By the mid-1970s, opposition from the NCAA had made intercollegiate athletics the most controversial part of Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting discrimination in all federally funded education programs and activities. At the same time, some of the most motivated, highly skilled women athletes in colleges and universities could no longer tolerate the long-standing differences between men’s and women‘s separate but obviously unequal sports programs. In Invisible Seasons, Belanger recalls the remarkable story of how the MSU women athletes helped change the landscape of higher education athletics. They learned the hard way that even groundbreaking civil rights laws are not self-executing. This behind-the?scenes look at a university sports program challenges us all to think about what it really means to put equality into practice, especially in the money-driven world of college sports.

Amid apocalyptic invasions and time travel, one common machine continually appears in H. G. Wells’s works: the bicycle. From his scientific romances and social comedies, to utopias, futurological speculations, and letters, Wells’s texts brim with bicycles. In The War of the Wheels, Withers examines this mode of transportation as both something that played a significant role in Wells’s personal life and as a literary device for creating elaborate characters and exploring complex themes.Withers traces Wells’s ambivalent relationship with the bicycle throughout his writing. While Wells celebrated it as a singular and astonishing piece of technology, and continued to do so long after his contemporaries abandoned their enthusiasm for the bicycle, he was not an unwavering promoter of this machine. Wells acknowledged the complex nature of cycling, its contribution to a growing dependence on and fetishization of technology, and its role in humanity’s increasing sense of superiority. Moving into the twenty-first century, Withers reflects on how the works of H. G. Wells can serve as a valuable locus for thinking through many of our current issues and problems related to transportation, mobility, and sustainability.

With every touchdown, home run, and three-pointer, star athletes represent an American dream that only an elite group blessed with natural talent can achieve. However, Kimball concentrates on what happens once these modern warriors meet their untimely demise. As athletes die, legends rise in their place.The premature deaths of celebrated players not only capture and immortalize their physical superiority, but also jolt their fans with an unanticipated intensity. These athletes escape the inevitability of aging and decline of skill, with only the prime of their youth left to be remembered. But early mortality alone does not transform athletes into immortals. The living ultimately gain the power to construct the legacies of their fallen heroes. In Legends Never Die, Kimball explores the public myths and representations that surround a wide range of athletes, from Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio to Dale Earnhardt and Bonnie McCarroll. Kimball delves deeper than just the cultural significance of sports and its players; he examines how each athlete’s narrative is shaped by gender relations, religion, and politics in contemporary America. In looking at how Americans react to the tragic deaths of sports heroes, Kimball illuminates the important role sports play in US society and helps to explain why star athletes possess such cultural power.

Fit for America is at once an intellectual biography of Major John L. Griffith, one of the preeminent intercollegiate athletics administrators of the twentieth century, and an in-depth look at how athletics shaped national military preparedness in a time of war and anticommunist sentiment.Lindaman traces Griffith’s forty-year career, one that spanned both world wars and included his appointment as the first Big Ten commissioner from 1922 until 1945. Griffith also served as NCAA president in the 1930s and later became the secretary-treasurer during World War II. Throughout his career, he worked tirelessly to advance the role and importance of collegiate sports on a regional and national level. In an era of heightened fears of communism, Griffith saw intercollegiate athletics as a way to prepare young men to become fit, disciplined military recruits. Griffith also founded his own publication, the Athletic Journal, in 1922 in which he published opinion pieces and solicited the opinions of other leading coaches and administrators nationwide. Through these pages, Lindaman explores not only Griffith’s philosophy but also the emergence of a coaching and athletic administration network. Drawing on voluminous primary source material and the many writings Griffith left behind, Fit for America brings long-overdue attention to a figure who was instrumental in shaping the world of American intercollegiate sports.

The bicycle has long been a part of American culture but few would describe it as an essential element of American identity in the same way that it is fundamental to European and Asian cultures. Instead, American culture has had a more turbulent relationship with the bicycle. First introduced in the United States in the 1830s, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s as it evolved to become a popular form of locomotion for adults. Two decades later, ridership in the United States collapsed. As automobile consumption grew, bicycles were seen as backward and unbecoming—particularly for the white middle class.Turpin chronicles the story of how the bicycle’s image changed dramatically, shedding light on how American consumer patterns are shaped over time. Turpin identifies the creation and development of childhood consumerism as a key factor in the bicycle’s evolution. In an attempt to resurrect dwindling sales, sports marketers reimagined the bicycle as a child’s toy. By the 1950s, it had been firmly established as a symbol of boyhood adolescence, further accelerating the declining number of adult consumers.Tracing the ways in which cycling suffered such a loss in popularity among adults is fundamental to understanding why the United States would be considered a ""car"" culture from the 1950s to today. As a lens for viewing American history, the story of the bicycle deepens our understanding of our national culture and the forces that influence it.

On April 23, 1929, the second annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America, known as the Bunion Derby, was in its twenty-fifth day. Eddie "the Sheik" Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, was leading the race across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River. Along with the signature outfit that earned him his nickname—a white towel tied around his head, white shorts, and a white shirt—Gardner wore an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run through the Jim Crow South that he was an American and the leader of the greatest footrace in the world.Kastner traces Gardner’s remarkable journey from his birth in 1897 in Birmingham, Alabama, to his success in Seattle, Washington, as one of the top long-distance runners in the region, and finally to his participation in two transcontinental footraces where he risked his life, facing a barrage of harassment for having the audacity to compete with white runners. Kastner shows how Gardner’s participation became a way to protest the endemic racism he faced, heralding the future of nonviolent efforts that would be instrumental to the civil rights movement. Shining a bright light on his extraordinary athletic accomplishments and his heroism on the dusty roads of America in the 1920s, Kastner gives Gardner and other black bunioneers the attention they so richly deserve.

Robinson takes readers on a globe-trotting tour that combines a historian’s insight with vivid personal memories going back to just after World War II. From experiencing the 1948 ""Austerity Olympics"" in London as a young spectator to working as a journalist in the Boston Marathon media center at the moment of the 2013 bombings, Robinson offers a fascinating first-person account of the tragic and triumphant moments that impacted the world and shaped the modern sport. He chronicles the beginnings of the American running boom, the emergence of women's running, the end of the old amateur rules, and the redefinition of aging for athletes and amateurs.With an intimate perspective and insightful reporting, Robinson captures major historical events through the lens of running. He recounts running in Berlin at the time of German reunification in 1990, organizing a replacement track meet in New Zealand after the disastrous 2011 earthquake, and the triumph of Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. As an avid runner, journalist, and fan, Robinson brings these global events to life and reveals the intimate and powerful ways in which running has intersected with recent history.

Chicago may seem a surprising choice for studying thoroughbred racing, especially since it was originally a famous harness racing town and did not get heavily into thoroughbred racing until the 1880s. However, Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was second only to New York as a center of both thoroughbred racing and off-track gambling. Horse Racing the Chicago Way shines a light on this fascinating, complicated history, exploring the role of political influence and class in the rise and fall of thoroughbred racing; the business of racing; the cultural and social significance of racing; and the impact widespread opposition to gambling in Illinois had on the sport. Riess also draws attention to the nexus that existed between horse racing, politics, and syndicate crime, as well as the emergence of neighborhood bookmaking, and the role of the national racing wire in Chicago. Taking readers from the grandstands of Chicago's finest tracks to the underworld of crime syndicates and downtown poolrooms, Riess brings to life this understudied era of sports history.