The Routledge History of American Sport

Linda J. Borish, David K. Wiggins, Gerald R. Gems, Linda J. Borish, David K. Wiggins, Gerald R. Gems

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317662495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

The Routledge History of American Sport provides the first comprehensive overview of historical research in American sport from the early Colonial period to the present day. Considering sport through innovative themes and topics such as the business of sport, material culture and sport, the political uses of sport, and gender and sport, this text offers an interdisciplinary analysis of American leisure. Rather than moving chronologically through American history or considering the historical origins of each sport, these topics are dealt with organically within thematic chapters, emphasizing the influence of sport on American society.

The volume is divided into eight thematic sections that include detailed original essays on particular facets of each theme. Focusing on how sport has influenced the history of women, minorities, politics, the media, and culture, these thematic chapters survey the major areas of debate and discussion. The volume offers a comprehensive view of the history of sport in America, pushing the field to consider new themes and approaches as well.

Including a roster of contributors renowned in their fields of expertise, this ground-breaking collection is essential reading for all those interested in the history of American sport.

Part I

Introduction to American Sport History

Perspectives and Prospects

1
Theory and Method in American Sport History

John Soares

Introduction

In a 1983 historiographical essay, Melvin Adelman recalled writing a decade earlier about “scholarly developments in American sport history.” In Adelman’s recollection, writing that earlier essay had been “interesting but not … arduous” because at the time, “the number of scholarly works on this subject was quite limited.” In the intervening decade, Adelman had observed a “tremendous explosion in the number of studies on sport from different disciplinary perspectives.” Adelman celebrated this development as “one of many indicators of the progress made in the study of American sport history.”¹

This increase in scholarship on American sport history has only gained momentum in the years since. By 1997 American sport history had advanced to the point where S.W. Pope edited a volume with contributions from a number of established scholars in the field entitled The New American Sport History.² Sport historians have long had their own organization, the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH), and its publishing outlet, the Journal of Sport History. Historians of American sport have published in other academic journals, sport-related publications like The International Journal of the History of Sport and Sport History Review, and journals of other specialized subfields, including The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, The Journal of Urban History, Diplomatic History, and Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, among others. Scholars working on American sport have published monographs with some of the most respected academic publishers, including the Oxford University and Harvard University presses.

In producing this body of work, historians of American sport have developed varied intellectual approaches that have been influenced by, and influenced, scholarship in such varied historical subfields as social, cultural, intellectual, economic, political, urban, ethnic, Western, African American, and diplomatic history. Numerous authors and works illustrate this: Donald Mrozek’s work on Native American games has shaped our understanding of the American West.³ Influential works by Adelman, Stephen Hardy, and Steven Riess illuminate connections between sport and the development of American cities.⁴ A number of scholars have examined the links between sport and race, religion, or ethnicity. Examples of this include the prize-winning scholarship of Samuel Regalado on Latinos.⁵ The work of such scholars as Jules Tygiel, David Wiggins, Michael Lomax, and Charles Martin has explored the connections between race and sport in the case of African Americans.⁶ John Bloom has done important work on sport and Native Americans.⁷ Sport historians have examined the influence of sport on approaches to gender, such as in Gerald Early’s placing of sport and race in the context of cultural constructions of African American masculinity.⁸ Many historians, including Susan Cahn, Martha Verbrugge, Jaime Schultz, and Susan Ware, have looked at women, gender, and sport.⁹

Specific sports, too, have come in for close examination. Scholars writing on baseball form a Who’s Who in American history; Michael Oriard has written extensively on football, and Elliott Gorn and Gerald Gems have looked at boxing.¹⁰ The Olympics, and American participation in them, have drawn coverage from scholars like Allen Guttmann and Mark Dyreson.¹¹ Historians dealing with sport have examined U.S. connections with the world; Thomas Zeiler and Gems have published on sport and American imperialism, and Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu on sport and U.S.-Japanese relations.¹² Historians also have examined more specialized topics, like David Zang’s work on sports “in the age of Aquarius,” Andrew Zimbalist on the economics of professional sport, or Robert Trumpbour on municipal funding of sports stadiums.¹³

The varied intellectual backgrounds of sport historians contribute to the richness of this work. A number of sport historians have been trained in or held faculty appointments in departments outside history, including health and physical education, English, and economics. In fact, some key contributions to sport history have been made by historians who might not even classify themselves as historians of sport.

This wealth of scholarship has spawned a number of theoretical and methodological approaches. The purpose of this essay is to consider some of the most influential of these, offer some illustrative examples, and consider some of the sources and methods historians have used to inform sport history. It is not, and does not claim to be, an exhaustive historiographical treatment of the large and growing body of sport history literature. In some of the most significant theoretical developments, sport historians have wrestled with questions about modernization, social control, the ideology of American sport, and sport as a means of inclusion or exclusion. Sport historians dealing with social control theory have been influenced by Marxist and neo-Marxist arguments. Ideologically, sport historians have speculated as to whether the United States should be considered a “sporting republic” with an ideology of sport. Sport historians also have explored American sport in comparative perspective, embracing “international” and “transnational” approaches. In much writing, sport historians have wrestled with questions of race, class, and gender that also have occupied colleagues in other areas of history. In rendering their varied interpretations, sport historians have often done work that is conceptually synthetic, even while engaged in primary-source research and the production of monographic treatments of topics.

Theory in American Sport History

Modernization has offered an important theoretical approach to sport history, typically without any Whiggish interpretation that modernization invariably means moral progress. Allen Guttmann argued that sport developed distinctive characteristics, which distinguished it from the sports of classical antiquity and from other premodern games and pastimes. Mel Adelman emphasized sport’s progression from informally organized games played under loose rules, with local competition and limited public information or record keeping, to modern sport, defined by formal sports played under standardized rules with national (or international) competition, and the development of specialization within both the sports themselves and the communications media that report on them.¹⁴ In challenging this emphasis on modernity, Donald Mrozek specifically focused on the enduring significance of Native American games and rituals.¹⁵

Sport historians covering a clearly modern period, most notably those writing about the Progressive Era, have wrestled with the question of whether sport has served chiefly as a form of social control or social uplift. Proponents of social control theory, influenced by Robert Wiebe’s classic The Search for Order, have emphasized the role of sport for political, economic, and social elites in the late nineteenth century, as these elites attempted to deal with the consequences of dramatic technological growth, concentrations of economic power, the influx of immigrants, and a growing industrial working class and the possibilities that all of this threatened a revolutionary transformation of American society.¹⁶ Sport could serve as an avenue by which the wealthy and politically powerful asserted and maintained control over working classes. Many industrial workers were immigrants from European autocracies, often Catholics or Jews, whose fitness for citizenship in a democratic society was frequently doubted by native-born Protestants. Sport could promote the separation of the wealthy from the masses through activities like golf and yachting that were too expensive or required specialized facilities available only to the wealthy through private clubs. Working-class sport also could contribute to social control by “educating” workers to respect various forms of authority, with obedience to the rules on the playing field and their enforcement by referees being analogous to respect for workplace rules and the authority of company officials.¹⁷

Although sport might control workers by separating and limiting them, sport also could be a means of uplift. Well-intentioned reformers used sport to promote working-class health and well-being. Sport also could serve, like programs of the Settlement House movement, as a way to promote the assimilation and “Americanness” of immigrants—and to encourage them to abandon the ways of the old country. Influential scholars, though, have found the dichotomy between social control and social uplift too limiting. Roy Rosenzweig, for example, in his study of public parks in Worcester, Massachusetts, explicitly rejected the idea that “inert and totally pliable … workers uncritically accepted the park programs handed down by an omnipotent ruling class.”¹⁸ Rather than serving as a form of uplift or control, then, sport could be a site of negotiation and contestation among classes, interests, and stakeholders.

As this engagement with social control theory suggests, sport historians have been concerned about the exercise of power and hegemony in sport. Marxist theory posits that working-class sports are designed to keep the labor force fit and productive, and provide some recompense for work that became increasingly tedious as the United States grew more industrialized. In the process, according to Marxist theory, sport contributes to the repression by ruling circles of workers as well as women, African Americans, and other groups. Modern American sport, in this telling, is also a means by which elites also promote “militarism, nationalism and imperialism.”¹⁹

Critiques of sport’s role in perpetuating class divisions and elite control are buttressed by elites’ obvious establishment of rules of amateurism to exclude workers and by the elites’ hypocrisies in applying those rules. Expense and the necessary access to facilities for golf, tennis, yachting, and equestrian sports would keep the working class out of many upper-class pastimes, but rules governing amateurism could exclude workers even from economically affordable sports like track and field.²⁰ Early intercollegiate sport took shape at elite, exclusive universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Class exclusivity was necessarily part of its development. Professional baseball, too, fit into a paradigm of elite control and exploitation. The National Association of Base Ball Players, established in 1858, was supplanted by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs in 1876. The shift from organization by players to organization by clubs indicated the growing power of owners in the sport. Owners used their power to defeat players’ early efforts to organize and imposed the reserve clause that effectively bound each player to an individual club as long as the club wished to keep him; the reserve clau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Introduction to American Sport History: Perspectives and Prospects
• Part II Sport and Education
• Part III Race, Ethnicity, American Sport, and Identity
• Part IV Gender and American Sport
• Part V The Business of Sport
• Part VI Material Culture and Sport
• Part VII Social Movements and Political Uses of Sport
• Part VIII Facets of Sport in Recent American Culture
• Suggested Further Readings
• Index