Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876-1926

ISBN-13: 9780195091335 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 240 str.

S. W. Pope

Opis

In Patriotic Games, historian Stephen Pope explores the ways sport was transformed from a mere amusement into a metaphor for American life. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, sport became the most pervasive popular cultural activity in American society. During these years, basketball was invented, football became a mass spectator event, and baseball soared to its status as the "national pasttime." Pope demonstrates how America's sporting tradition emerged from a society fractured along class, race, ethnic, and gender lines. Institutionalized sport became a trans- class mechanism for packaging power and society in preferred ways--it popularized an interlocking set of cultural ideas about America's quest for national greatness. Nowhere was this more evident than the intimate connection established between sport and national holiday celebrations. As Pope reveals, Thanksgiving sports influenced the holiday's evolution from a religious occasion to a secular one. On the Fourth of July, sporting events infused patriotic rituals with sentiments that emphasized class conciliation and ethnic assimilation. In a time of social tensions, economic downturns, and unprecedented immigration, the rituals and enthusiasms of sport, Pope argues, became a central component in the shaping of America's national identity.

Recenzje

Pope has done a masterful job to give us a definitive account of the time when sports and national identity came to be connected. The clarity and specificity of his language made this book a pleasure to read. Those in the development of American sports should read this book, as should anyone curious about how the rhetoric of nationalism became dependent upon its connection to the rhetoric of athletics

O autorze

Steven W. Pope is an Instructor at the University of Southern Maine.