Making Sport History

Disciplines, identities and the historiography of sport

Pascal Delheye

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136289729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The field of sport history is a relatively new research domain, situated at the intersection of a number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. This interdisciplinarity has created interesting avenues for growth and fresh thinking but also inherent problems of coherence and identity. Making Sport History examines the development of an academic community around sport history, exploring the roots of the discipline, its current boundaries, borders and challenges, and looking ahead at future prospects. Written by a team of world-leading sport historians, with commentaries from scholars working outside of the sport historical mainstream, the book considers key themes in the historiography of sport, including:

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• The relationship between history, sport studies and physical education

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• Comparative analysis of the role of historians in the writing of sport history

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• Modern and post-modern approaches to sport history

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• Race, gender and the sport historical establishment

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• The role of scholarly organisations, conferences and journals in discipline-building

Presenting new perspectives on what constitutes sport history and its core methodologies, the book helps explain why historians have become interested in sport, why they've chosen the topics they have, and how their work has influenced the wider world of history and been influenced by it. Making Sport History is essential reading for any advanced student, scholar or researcher with an interest in sport history, historiography, or the history and philosophy of the social sciences.

Part I A child with different mothers Sport history between physical education and history

1 Sport historiography? An overview through the eyes of a physical educator

Roberta Park

DOI: 10.4324/9780203114131-1

‘One should make a serious study of a pastime.’ These words, attributed to Alexander the Great, appear on the title page of the 1801 edition of Joseph Strutt’s The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England From the Earliest Period. The noted American contributor to advancing writing about the history of sport, Allen Guttmann, has credited Strutt’s book with proclaiming the ‘scholarly legitimacy’ of such investigations.¹ Throughout history the most popular pastime almost certainly has been ‘sport’. However, different cultures and periods have attributed to the term somewhat different meanings. Although writings dealing with some aspect of the history of sport have existed for centuries, it was not until recently that researching and writing about ‘the history of sport’ began to be recognized as a scholarly endeavour.

One of the first challenges to be faced when attempting to study the history of sport is what should be included within the term at a particular period and locale. This point, made by numerous authors, opens Thomas Scanlon’s recent article ‘Contesting Ancient Mediterranean Sport’.² In today’s world ‘sport’ is usually, but not always, defined as an organized competitive physical activity, the performance of which requires considerable neuromuscular skill. It often is closely affiliated with ‘athletics’, which derives from the Greek athlein (to contend for a prize). However, some individuals are of the opinion that ‘sport’ as a category of investigation should be considerably broader and include matters relevant to recreation and out-of-door activities, play, and even physical education. Herbert Manchester, for example, included chapters dealing with horse racing, hunting and other field sports as well as ball games and regattas in his 1931 book Four Centuries of Sport in America: 1490–1890.³ The situation is complicated by the fact that ‘the history of sport’ and ‘sport history’ often are defined differently. Citing a study that the North American Society for Sport History had commissioned in 2004, Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young recently wrote: ‘“sport history” pursues a specialist agenda that is not shared with the “history of sport”’.⁴ Rather than a strict adherence to such a dichotomy, might it not be better to give due consideration to the quality of the research? Well executed ‘specialist’ studies, after all, have been known to be of value in helping to shed better light upon many aspects of the past.

The types of activities that were popular when King James I issued a Declaration of Sports in 1618 were quite different than what exists today. A major stimulus for many of today’s most prominent sports was the ‘games-playing’ that emerged in England during the nineteenth century, especially in association with elite public schools like Rugby and Harrow. By 1914 the British Empire had brought games like football (sometimes referred to as soccer) and cricket to many parts of the world.⁵ In other instances it was individuals who had located to another country for commercial reasons or were a descendent of a British parent who was living abroad. Heiner Gillmeister, for example, has observed that Englishmen living in Berlin had a role in establishing Germany’s first sporting journals and helping to foster certain sporting activities. Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles (born in Rotterdam in 1871 of a Scottish father and a Polish mother) edited the early German sporting publication Sport im Bild and had a role in founding the Lawn-Tennis Turnier Club of Berlin in 1897.⁶ Football was brought to Brazil in the late 1800s by English and Scottish engineers who had located there to help build the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo railways.⁷

A desire to spread the Christian gospel also had an important role. During the late 1800s and early 1900s the United States’ efforts to extend its influence in Latin America, the Philippines, and China were facilitated by work of the Young Men’s Christian Association, which used basketball, volleyball, and other games as intended socializing devices.⁸ By the time the First World War began sporting activities that had their origins in Britain or the United States had been accepted in many countries. However, in spite of the fact that the number of articles, books, conference proceedings, and other writings about the history of sport has increased remarkably during the last three and a half decades, the extent to which other countries adopted the values that the originators had intended remains in need of more examination.

Lack of familiarity with other languages is one of several things that affect what a person is able to learn about developments in different countries and how historians go about their tasks. Whereas many Europeans whose work has contributed to advancing the historical study of sport possess skills in several languages, those whose native language is English (with some notable exceptions) do not. How much, if at all, ever-expanding media and other devices might change this remains to be seen. Regrettably, the author of this article has only limited facility with other languages. Therefore, its focus is the United States with some relevant attention to what has occurred elsewhere. Because the history of physical education (which has been more important than typically is realized) remains under-examined, it also gives more attention to this matter than often has been done.

Early writings about the history of sport, especially in Britain and the United States

Although the War of Independence (1775–1783) had ended Britain’s control of the United States of America, important contacts between the two countries, facilitated by a shared language, continued. Horatio Smith’s Festivals, Games and Amusements, Ancient and Modern, which concentrated upon such things as the Classical World and medieval tournaments, was published in both London and New York in 1831.⁹ In 1855 Unitarian minister Abel A. Livermore criticized what he saw as a lack of vigorous manhood in the United States. Beginning with the words ‘O for a touch of the Olympic games rather than this pallid effeminacy’, he urged America’s colleges to devote more attention to athletic games.¹⁰ Within four decades they would be doing this with fervent zeal. However, the ‘gentleman amateur’ ethos proclaimed in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Thomas Hughes’ laudatory account of Rugby and the games-playing that was emerging at elite English public schools, would be increasingly ignored even though the book was quite popular in the United States.

In her path-breaking book People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (1996), Nancy Struna maintains that Colonial Americans not only engaged in a wide range of sports and physical activities; they often wrote about such things. Charles Peverelly’s more than five-hundred-page The Book of American Pastimes,¹¹ published in 1866, gave extensive attention to cricket, rowing, and yachting as well as baseball, which had evolved from stoolball (or rounders) and now was being touted as America’s ‘national game’. Brief historical accounts of baseball teams, most of which were narrowly focused upon such things as victories and ‘star’ players, would appear with increasing frequency in a variety of publications; so would similar accounts of such things as pedestrianism and boxing.¹² Authors who wrote for more erudite journals like the North American Review and Lippincott’s Magazine sometimes included brief historical comments about more ‘gentlemanly’ sports in the articles that they wrote during the late 1800s. Lloyd S. Bryce’s ‘A Plea for Sport’ and J. William White’s ‘A Physician’s View of Exercise and Athletics’ are two examples.¹³

Britain’s Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, initiated in 1895, published an ongoing number of articles dealing with the history of cricket, football, tennis, golf, boating, and other activities. Anthony Gaest’s ‘More Notes on Old English Games’, E. H. Parker’s historical sketch ‘Chinese Games and Sports’, and the Reverend W. K. R. Bedford’s ‘University Rowing Fifty Years Ago’ are three examples.¹⁴ Chapters on skating, rowing, and other sports that comprised Jan Feith’s Het Boek der Sporten (1900) included some historical information. Jean J. Jusserand’s Les Sports et Jeux d’Exercise dans l’Ancienne France was published at Paris in 1901; William Heywood’s Palio and Ponte: An Account of the Sports of Central Italy from the Age of Dante to the Twentieth Century (1904) was published in both Siena and London.¹⁵ Histories of ancient sport, not surprisingly, typically have been written by individuals whose field is Classics. E. Norman Gardiner’s Greek Athletic Sports Festivals appeared in 1910. His Athletics of the Ancient World, published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1930, would remain what some considered the most important English-language book dealing with these matters until H. W. Pleket and M. I. Finley’s The Olympic Games: The First Thousand Years was published in 1976. Donald Kyle’s Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World became available in 2007.¹⁶

In 1925 historian Frederic L. Paxson would win a Pulitzer Prize for his well-received book History of the American Frontier: 1763–1893. Eight years earlier The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (the journal of the Organization of American Historians) had published his article ‘The Rise of Sport’.¹⁷ However, at that time and for many years few academics had any interest in such mundane matters. Neither the University of California Memorial that was written following his death in 1948 nor Earl Pomeroy’s 1953 Mississippi Valley Historical Review article ‘Frederic L. Paxson and His Approach to History’ made the slightest comment about Paxson’s 1917 article ‘The Rise of Sport’.¹⁸

Annals of American Sport, historian John Krout’s chronicle of sporting events from Colonial times to the early 1900s, was published in1929 as volume fifteen of the Pageant of America series. Jennie Holliman’s 1931 book American Sports: 1785–1835 was based upon her dissertation at Columbia University. In the Preface Holliman thanks her advisor and Krout for their inspiration and suggestions.¹⁹ Historian John Betts’ 1951 doctoral dissertation ‘Organized Sport in Industrial America’ would not be published until three years after his death in 1971 as America’s Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950. The book, which some have referred to as a milestone in the history of sport – at least in the United States – had been made possible through the editorial efforts of John Loy and others. The Forward contains the following words: ‘There was little demand for a book on the history of American sport at the time [Betts] completed his doctorate, and in ensuing years he found few fellow historians who deemed the study of sport a worthwhile endeavor. It was only in the last years of Betts’ life that his several historical studies of sport attracted the attention of colleagues in his own field and that of many historically oriented scholars in physical education.’²⁰

Contributions from physical education

The first issue of William Russell’s American Journal of Education (January 1826) had included a five-page article that endorsed the importance of physical education.²¹ The many books and articles dealing with health and physical education that followed sometimes contained brief historical accounts or comments. Publications regarding the ‘history of physical education’, which began in the late 1800s, like those dealing with the ‘history of sport’, initially were largely chronicles. Nancy Struna has credited Edward M. Hartwell with being the stimulus for what would ensue.²² At the request of John Eaton (Commissioner of the United States Bureau of Education), in 1885 Hartwell had prepared Physical Training in American Colleges and Universities, which contains a limited amount of relevant his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge studies in crime and society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Contributers
• Prologue
• PART I A child with different mothers: Sport history between physical education and history
• PART II In search of a paradigm: Methodological opportunities and battles
• PART III Establishing a scientific community: Scholarly organisations and journals
• PART IV White male sport history: Tackling the scientific establishment
• PART V Commentaries
• Index