Routledge Handbook of Sport History

Murray G. Phillips, Douglas Booth, Carly Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000441666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is a new and innovative survey of the discipline of sport history.

Global in scope, it examines the key contemporary issues in sports historiography, sheds light on previously ignored topics, and sets an intellectual agenda for the future development of the discipline. The book explores both traditional and non-traditional methodologies in sport history, and traces the interface between sport history and other fields of research, such as literature, material culture and the digital humanities. It considers the importance of key issues such as gender, race, sexuality and politics to our understanding of sport history, and focuses on innovative ways that the scholarship around these issues is challenging accepted discourses. This is the first handbook to include a full section on Indigenous sport history, a topic that has often been ignored in sport history surveys despite its powerful upstream influence on contemporary sport. The book also reflects carefully on the central importance of sport history journals in shaping the development of the discipline.

This book is an essential reference for any student, researcher or scholar with an interest in sport history or the relationship between sport and society. It will also be fascinating reading for any historians looking for fresh perspectives on contemporary historiography or social and cultural history.

PART 1

History and representing the sporting past

1

HISTORY AND REPRESENTING THE SPORTING PAST

Introduction

Douglas Booth, Carly Adams and Murray G. Phillips

Prompted by an amalgam of feminism, postmodernism, and the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, historians are increasingly reflecting on, and explicitly addressing, their understanding of, and relationship with, the past. Today, historians working across various subdisciplines are more willing to acknowledge the fallacy of trying to reconstruct the past-as-it-was – whether by assembling remnants from the past or by applying theoretical concepts to the interpretation of empirical evidence. Historians of sport are among those who are engaging with these issues. Collectively, their musings constitute one of the more pronounced shifts in the subdiscipline in recent times and signal the emergence of representational approaches in history or history as a representation of the past.¹ Many of those historians are contributors to this Handbook. The opening Part of the Handbook, ‘History and Representing the Sporting Past’, comprises chapters from those who are thinking about, and engaging with, the presentation of the past. Drawing on these contributions, and referring to others in the second Part of the Handbook, ‘New Perspectives on Old Themes’, our introduction to the Part outlines the key issues associated with representations of the sporting past under four headings: reflexivity, narrative, authorial choices, and ethics.

Reflexivity

As a prerequisite for understanding the different ways in which historians subconsciously and consciously present the past, reflexivity refers to a heightened state of self-awareness in which practitioners make continual references to their own involvement in their histories. A reflexive historian explains how they represent the past as history and the different ways they unavoidably influence their presentation of the past; the reflexive historian enters into dialogues with other viewpoints. Reflexivity is a hallmark of all the contributors in this Part. However, reflecting wider paradigmatic and methodological debates in sport history, the contributors offer different perspectives and, in some instances, resolutions.

Malcolm MacLean (Chapter 2) contends that historians ‘borrow ideas, techniques, questions, and answers from other subdisciplines’, but he also recognizes an absence of broader reflexivity within the subdiscipline. He identifies two persisting structural barriers. The first is the nature of History (as the discipline of the grand narrative of human time), which tends to discourage self-awareness among its practitioners. MacLean identifies a ‘distinctive form … of knowingness’ within the history of sport as a second obstacle. Grounded in ‘fandom’, this form of knowing, MacLean argues, is unconducive to the reflexivity or critical awareness of the field which is necessary if sport history is to become ‘its own object’.

Richard Pringle (Chapter 3) expands MacLean’s arguments concerning the absence of critical awareness in sport history in his discussion of the enmity between sport historians and sport sociologists. The ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological antagonisms between the two subdisciplines, Pringle argues, actually belie their ‘common political and ideological ground’, which he maintains is also shared across the social sciences.² As a case in point, Pringle refers to the ‘fundamental preoccupations’ of feminist sport history and feminist sport sociology; both advocate cultural intervention as an avenue to a ‘future beyond patriarchy’.

Like MacLean, Mike Cronin (Chapter 4) discerns historians of sport who have moved past traditional ‘empiricism’ and who are thinking about ‘form, content, value, and narration’, and who are questioning ‘historic meaning’. However, as with Pringle, Cronin believes that historians of sport have much to learn about historical meaning and that they can profit from a closer engagement with the debates and issues in the broader discipline. Cronin illustrates his case with an insightful survey of the current debates around microhistory and microhistory in the mainstream of the discipline. His crucial point is not that the methodologies of microhistory and microhistory per se are the avenues to an enlightened understanding of historical meaning. On the contrary, Cronin cites examples of historians of sport who have produced quality microhistory and who have engaged with macrohistory.³ Rather, the lesson comes from the self-reflexive mindsets of the historians who are debating these approaches and who are consciously explaining how they choose their themes, level of detail, contexts, and comparisons (see also Jaime Schultz, Michelle Sikes, and Cat Ariail’s Chapter 21 in Part 2 and their discussion of a ‘global perspective’ and their ‘Top 10’ list of turns).⁴

Mark Falcous (Chapter 5) agrees with Pringle’s and Cronin’s propositions that historians of sport can profit from venturing beyond the somewhat narrow confines of the sub-discipline. Falcous directs attention to the newly emerging intellectual stream of physical cultural studies.⁵ As well as offering a useful overview of physical cultural studies and its key methodological, theoretical, and political debates, Falcous points historians of sport to a kindred subdiscipline that promotes self-reflexivity, that resides on the fringes of a mainstream field, that is simultaneously vying for a place in the broader scholarly conglomerate of kinesiology/sports studies, and that confronts a generally hostile, anti-intellectual and political climate.

Daniel Nathan (Chapter 6) is another contributor who draws on the literature beyond the immediate realm of sport history. Nathan’s references include the philosopher Alex Rosenberg, the critical theorist Linda Hutcheon, mainstream historians Hans Kellner, Peter Novick, and Alan Spitzer, and the philosopher of history, Hayden White. Their works underscore Nathan’s argument about the centrality of narrative to our understanding of both sport and the past, and, more fundamentally, to the way we present the sporting past.

Narrative (story)

In his contribution ‘Narrative/s in Sport History’, Nathan (Chapter 6) encapsulates perhaps the most pronounced shift in the subdiscipline in recent times, namely, the growing recognition that history is ‘the discourse used to represent and analyse the past, rather than the past itself with narrative assuming the preferred discourse among historians. A typical narrative, Nathan explains, has a beginning, middle, and end, and each stage prepares and produces what follows. A coherent, effective narrative aligns the parts into a whole and resolves tensions between, or contradictions within, the parts. Crucially, a narrative contains a plot, a mode of organizing the evidence as a genre of story (for example, romance, tragedy, comedy, satire) in order to, in the words of White, ‘add meaning – usually a moral meaning’ — and to ‘wrap’ the subject up ‘in an account … from which instruction can be derived’.⁶

The implications of this formulation, which effectively translates history into a narrative representation of the past, are profound. Whereas the traditional idea of history as synonymous with the past emphasizes content and reduces narrative to prose style, the contemporary notion of historical narrative as the means by which historians create the past as history shifts the focus to content and form, and highlights the historian-author as an actor in creating our understanding of the past. No contributor offers a better example of the historian-author-actor than Gary Osmond. In Chapter 7, Osmond debunks the notions of history as synonymous with the past and the colonial and postcolonial archives as a locus of truth, objectivity, and neutrality. As he shows, there is increasing recognition that state archives generally exclude the memories and experiences of Indigenous communities. Osmond urges historians to take more care when contextualizing the archives. ‘In order to understand individual documents,’ he writes, ‘we must know what the archive contains and understand how records are written, represented, and stored in terms of language, context, and categorization.’ More importantly, Osmond proposes that historians can assist Indigenous communities to recover their pasts and construct alternative perspectives to those found in the written records. They can do this, he suggests, by taking archival material directly to communities or by annotating records. This brings us to authorial choices, the third of our key issues associated with representations of the sporting past.

Authorial choices

As Nathan reminds us, and as Osmond demonstrates, ‘stories don’t tell themselves – they are crafted by storytellers’ who make choices at every turn. Authors select the content, including the empirical evidence and analytical concepts; they decide the form of the story including its metaphors, tropes, plots, arguments, and the narrator’s voice and perspective. Nathan offers several examples of how those choices can change the way we understand and interpret the past. In the remainder of this subsection we comment on three choices: perspectives and conceptualizations, and theory.

Perspectives and conceptualizations

The second Part of the Handbook comprises chapters from contributors who offer new perspectives on enduring themes within the subfield. These include the origins of modern sport, sexuality, nationalism, race and racism, time and space, and politics. While new perspectives and conceptualizations can emerge along with fresh evidence and freshly formulated analytical concepts and theories, ultimately, their presentation depends on the choices made by historian-authors: the past does not produce perspectives and conceptualizations any more than it writes narratives.⁷ Indeed, much of the impetus for recent perspectives and conceptualizations in the history of sport derives from a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences known as the cultural turn.⁸ Somewhat arbitrarily, we include the chapters by Maureen Smith, Angie Abdou, and Russell Field in this Part. In their reconceptualizations of material culture (Smith and Abdou) and sports activism (Field), these authors illustrate our point about historians as authors who make choices about the past.

Smith (Chapter 8) offers two particularly clear examples of choices about the representation of the past in her discussions of sport museums and halls of fame, and cultural fragments. While the stories told in sport museums and halls of fame typically glorify and celebrate sports participants (players, administrators, spectators), professional historians tend to present a different genre of story based on critique, complexity, and nuance. It is not the past per se that dictates these forms of representation, rather it is the historian’s perspectives, conceptualizations, and interpretations (see also Sarah Barnes and Mary McDonald’s discussion on memorialization in Chapter 19, ‘Race, Racism, and Racial Entanglements’, in Part 2). Similarly, in her discussion of the increasing interest among historians in material fragments from the sporting past (e.g. ticket stubs, mascot figures, sports shoes, tape measures – the list is endless), Smith observes the important roles of the senses and emotions in attaching meaning to those fragments and ultimately ‘how we tell stories and how we remember a story’ (see also Barbara Keys’ Chapter 27 in Part 3). Historians have, of course, always confronted incomplete and biased fragments from the past that have posed problems for analysis and interpretation; introducing human senses and emotions merely compounds the problem. However, the reconceptualization of material culture under the impetus of the cultural turn is, as Smith indicates, helping historians become more comfortable with ambiguity and doubt, and empowering them to write different types of stories that deal with an ‘uncertain past’.⁹ This is precisely the kind of reflexivity referred to by MacLean, Cronin, and Falcous.

Abdou (Chapter 9) adds weight to Smith’s notions about the uncertain past and the importance of understanding and embracing human senses in her chapter about historical fiction. Abdou’s example of Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island (2008), a story about open-water swimming in the 1920s, is especially edifying, with the narrative ‘combin[ing] the historical and the visceral’. Warwick, Abdou argues, ‘capture[s] the physical sensations of the sport’ including the initial immersion in the water, the “‘underwater glide, the flying, weightless sensation of being suspended-free”’ and others associated with the unfolding race: the “‘racket of breaking water and muffled echo, a tumble of ache, throbbing shoulders, and smarting red eyelids”’. As Abdou demonstrates, fiction – the archetypal authorial choice – has been critical to bringing the human senses to representations of the past.¹⁰

In his big picture overview of sport as political activism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Russell Field (Chapter 10) acknowledges that there are multiple ways to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Sports photographs as historical documents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 History and representing the sporting past
• Part 2 New perspectives on old themes
• Part 3 Emerging themes
• Part 4 Indigenous sport history
• Part 5 Sport history journals
• Part 6 Conclusion
• Index