Discusses how individual sports developed, what institutions and groups spread them, and why certain sports and not others found a ready audience elsewhere. This book demonstrates that sports are not a trivial pursuit but are deeply embedded in the way individuals and nations wish to be perceived.

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler s Third Reich and international sporting competition. This volume gathers original essays by modern scholars from the Games most prominent participating countries and lays out the issues -- sporting as well as political -- surrounding individual nations involvement.
"The Nazi Olympics" opens with an analysis of Germany s preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler s racist ideals and expansionist ambitions.
Essays follow on the United States,...

Mark Dyreson locates the invasion of sport at the heart of American culture at the turn of the century. It was then that social reformers and political leaders believed that sport could revitalize the republican experiment, that a new sense of national identity could forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order as it would serve to link America's thinking classes with the experiences of the masses. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in American accounts of the Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912. In connecting sport to American history and culture, Dyreson has...

Evaluates Ali's import outside the ring as cultural icon, antiwar protestor, and narcissist.

Discusses the ideology of baseball, professional baseball and urban politics, politics, ballparks, and the neighborhoods, social reform, and baseball as a source of social mobility.

A case study of college football. It looks at the birth of bigtime college sport, showing how gridiron glory and scandal were prefigured in Chicago's football industry of the early twentieth century, presided over by the brilliant, combative, saintly, but very human Amos Alonzo Stagg.

Uses biographies to describe women's transformation from serious rodeo athletes to beauty queens and their successful struggle to regain their place, and respect, as the competitive athletes that they are.

Where is the truth about baseball to be found? In nostalgic stories of the timeless bond woven between fathers and sons on the ball field. Or in stinging expos about manipulative owners, abusive coaches, and greedy players. Beginning with a mostly truthful essay about an exhausted university department chair who believes a visit to Cooperstown can save his soul and ending with the story of a delusional university professor who loses his mind because he takes baseball-and baseball writing-too seriously, Extra Innings tackles the question of how writing about baseball has shaped our...