Chicago has garnered national recognition by winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and a string of titles in the National Basketball Association. But amateur sports also play a large role in the city's athletic traditions, especially in schools and youth leagues. In fourteen chapters, experts focus on multiple aspects of Chicago sports, including long looks at amateur boxing, the impact of gender and ethnicity in sports, the politics of horse racing and stadium building, the lasting scandal of the Black Sox, and the perpetual heartbreak of the Cubs. Well illustrated with forty...

This book examines Chicago's long and glorious history of recreational and competitive sport, and as the home of the finest sporting events and most loyal fans in the United States. This indispensable collection surveys the essential events and main teams in the city's sports history--the Bears, the Cubs, the White Sox, the Black Hawks, and the Bulls--as well as great Chicago sports legends Red Grange, Michael Jordan, and others. The authors also examine more specialized sports such as racing, cycling, and women's baseball. In addition to examining the highlights of Chicago sport, "The...

If a religion cannot attract and instruct young people, it will struggle to survive, which is why recreational programs were second only to theological questions in the development of twentieth-century Mormonism. In this book, Richard Ian Kimball explores how Mormon leaders used recreational programs to ameliorate the problems of urbanization and industrialization and to inculcate morals and values in LDS youth. As well as promoting sports as a means of physical and spiritual excellence, Progressive Era Mormons established a variety of institutions such as the Deseret Gymnasium and camps...

The Cold War era spawned a host of anxieties in American society, and in response, Americans sought cultural institutions that reinforced their sense of national identity and held at bay their nagging insecurities. They saw football as a broad, though varied, embodiment of national values. College teams in particular were thought to exemplify the essence of America: strong men committed to hard work, teamwork, and overcoming pain. Toughness and defiance were primary virtues, and many found in the game an idealized American identity.

In this book, Kurt Kemper charts the steadily...

This unique sports and labor history charts the revolutionary transformation of track and field over the past thirty years. In this time, the sport has changed from an amateur effort whose governing bodies unfairly controlled its athletes' lives to a professional arena in which athletes have the power to make decisions in their own best interests. While historians have chronicled labor history in team sports such as baseball and football or have lumped track and field into larger studies of Olympic history, Joseph M. Turrini is the first to scrupulously detail the efforts of athletes to...