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This volume provides an interdisciplinary approach to legal history, utilizing law, linguistics, cultural anthropology and social history to document and analyze the slow but steady growth of the English common law from Anglo-Saxon times to the 19th century.
The larger-than-life story of Bernarr Macfadden, a bodybuilder who turned his obsession with muscles, celebrity, and confession into a publishing empire that transformed global media. In True Story, Shanon Fitzpatrick tells the unlikely story of an orphan from the Ozarks who became one of history’s most powerful media moguls. Born in 1868 in Mill Spring, Missouri, Bernarr Macfadden turned to bodybuilding to transform himself from a sickly “boy” into a creature of masculine perfection. He then channeled his passion into the magazine Physical Culture, capitalizing on the wider turn-of-the-century mania for fitness. Macfadden Publications soon become a pioneer in mass media, helping to in...
The story of Mildred Burke, the longest reigning champion of female wrestling, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Kings of Cocaine. In this in-depth account, journalist Jeff Leen pulls back the curtain on a forgotten era when a petite midwesterner used her beauty and brawn to dominate America’s most masculine sport. At only five feet two, Mildred Burke was an unlikely candidate for the ring. A waitress barely scraping by on Depression-era tips, she saw her way out when she attended her first wrestling match. When women were still struggling for equality with men, Burke regularly fought—and beat—male wrestlers. Rippling with muscle and dripping with diamonds, she...
"Wrestling to Rasslin' traces the roots of one of man's oldest competitive sports. Beginning in sporting bars in the late 1800s and graduating to Barnum sideshow tents, wrestling has thrilled the world over with such early athletes as William Muldoon, George Hackenschmidt, and Tom Jenkins. After World War II and the advent of television, wrestling took a turn toward the dramatic, emphasizing conflicts between good and evil.
This book may set down the myth of June Cleaver once and for all. Chad Dell deftly details a 1950s revolution in the making: millions of women of all ages flocked to wrestling arenas across the country, drawn to a parade of glistening bodies, purple satin capes and characters such as Gorgeous George and Killer Kowalski while millions more roared their approval as they watched on television. Dell's analysis of television broadcasts, media artifacts, fan club ephemera and interviews with wrestlers and their fans paints a new portrait of women in the 1950s who embraced the power of their passions.
"The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic", Gertrude Stein wrote in 1926. Unlike male modernists such as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, the modernist women poets Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell, Stein and H. D. never became "high" modernist models but remained "artistic outlaws". The present study shows how these women were present on the modernist scene but followed their own concepts and struggled to establish their position as modernist women poets. Defying definition, the four poets not only richly contributed to modernism, but were indeed its developers.
Throughout America's past, some men have feared the descent of their gender into effeminacy, and turned their eyes to the ring in hopes of salvation. This work explains how the dominant fight sports in the United States have changed over time in response to broad shifts in American culture and ideals of manhood, and presents a narrative of American history as seen from the bars, gyms, stadiums and living rooms of the heartland. Ordinary Americans were the agents who supported and participated in fight sports and determined its vision of masculinity. This work counters the economic determinism prevalent in studies of American fight sports, which overemphasize profit as the driving force in the popularization of these sports. The author also disputes previous scholarship's domestic focus, with an appreciation of how American fight sports are connected to the rest of the world.
This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England
"Players All is a stunning accomplishment, an agenda-setting work; it opens the space for a bold, and innovative, critical, performance-based discourse on mass sport, sport as entertainment, and spectatorship in the global, postmodern society." --Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In a book that is both scholarly and engagingly personal, Robert E. Rinehart takes us into the world of contemporary sport performances, from the Olympic Games to "The eXtreme Games," the Super Bowl to "The American Gladiators." He introduces us to sports tourism and the highly commercialized world of global sport. Rinehart analyzes the emergence of such "sports" as paint ball (and its associations with the Vietnam War) and indoor rock climbing (and its links to environmentalism and self-mastery). He shows how sports have become theatrical events and paints a revealing portrait of the new postmodern culture of sports.
Presents a study of the literary output of Sir John Suckling. This work reconstructs the various contexts in which the poems, plays, letters, and prose tracts were produced and, reveals the nature of one writer's engagement - both creative and subversive - with the social, religious, political, and cultural dimensions of Caroline England.