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The New Sport History

1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2702661

1080-6628

Steven A. Riess,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

The first major scholarly article on American sport history was written in 1917, followed twelve years later by John A. Krout's Annals of American Sport. Succeeding generations of historians neglected this subject not only because of other important topics to research, but also intellectual snobbery, career concerns, or a conviction that detailed analysis of sport would not foster new knowledge or explain important historical questions. An upsurge in interest began in the late 1960s as a result of the democratization of the historical profession, the rise of the New Social history, interdisciplinary influences, especially from cultural anthropology, the student revolution of the late 1960s that called for more relevant scholarship, and the organization of the North American Society for Sport History (1972), which created an intellectual community for historians interested in the study of sport. Initially the literature consisted primarily of a number of monographs on baseball and several biographies of sports heroes, but in the 1980s there has been a veritable flood of high quality sports research, raising new questions about old topics and branching off into new areas of inquiry.1 The new scholarship is extremely wide-ranging, although little has been done on the colonial or early national eras.2 Consequently, only the most dominant trends will be considered here. Most researchers have emphasized the period between 1850 and 1920, with a growing number examining the post-World War II era. This review examines models sport historians are employing; surveys what scholars are writing about the major American sports; considers such major themes as class, race, ethnicity, education, fitness, the genre of biography, and studies of recent American sport; and concludes by proposing an agenda for future research. Sport historians are generally very empirically-oriented, but a number of models have been employed to try to explain the rise of organized sport. Allen Guttmann and Melvin L. Adelman are the primary advocates of a modernization model. These Weberians state that modern sport has qualities that differentiate it from the sport of earlier eras: secularity, equality, bureaucratization, specialization, rationalization, quantification, and record keeping.