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A groundbreaking history of how women found synchronicity—and power—in water. “If you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim ‘pretty,’?” said a young Esther Williams to theater impresario Billy Rose. Since the nineteenth century, tensions between beauty and strength, aesthetics and athleticism have both impeded and propelled the careers of female swimmers—none more so than synchronized swimmers, for whom Williams is often considered godmother. In this revelatory history, Vicki Valosik traces a century of aquatic performance, from vaudeville to the Olympic arena, and brings to life the colorful cast of characters whose “pretty swimming...
In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first female to swim the English Channel--and broke the existing record time in doing so. Although today she is considered a pioneer in women's swimming, women were swimming competitively 50 years earlier. This historical book details the early period of women's competitive swimming in the United States, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through Ederle's astonishing accomplishment. Women and girls faced many obstacles to safe swimming opportunities, including restrictive beliefs about physical abilities, access to safe and clean water, bathing suits that impeded movement and became heavy in water, and opposition from official sporting organizations. The stories of these early swimmers plainly show how far female athletes have come.
A breathtaking history of America’s trail-blazing female science journalists—and the timely lessons they can teach us about equity, access, collaboration, and persistence. Writing for Their Lives tells the stories of women who pioneered the nascent profession of science journalism from the 1920s through the 1950s. Like the “hidden figures” of science, such as Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson, these women journalists, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette writes, were also overlooked in traditional histories of science and journalism. But, at a time when science, medicine, and the mass media were expanding dramatically, Emma Reh, Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, and many others were ...
Biography of the early years of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who would become Yale University’s first non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant president and commissioner of Major League Baseball. In 1977, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian American professor of Renaissance literature, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was chosen as the next president of Yale University, a radical act that was immediately perceived as a threat to the university’s embedded, eugenics-driven, Anglo-Saxon mentality. Eugenics, as practiced in America, and especially at Yale, locked into place those who were deemed “unfit” due to beliefs about their ethnicity, class, and racial character, beliefs that had endured for decades and to which Giama...
The spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of Native Americans and African Americans have long been sources of fascination and curiosity, owing to their marked difference from the religious traditions of white writers and researchers. Matter, Magic, and Spirit explores the ways religious and magical beliefs of Native Americans and African Americans have been represented in a range of discourses including anthropology, comparative religion, and literature. Though these beliefs were widely dismissed as primitive superstition and inferior to "higher" religions like Christianity, distinctions were still made between the supposed spiritual capacities of the different groups. David Murray's...
This book is an historical survey of women’s sport from 1850-1960. It looks at some of the more recent methodological approaches to writing sports history and raises questions about how the history of women’s sport has so far been shaped by academic writers. Questions explored in this text include: What are the fresh perspectives and newly available sources for the historian of women’s sport? How do these take forward established debates on women’s place in sporting culture and what novel approaches do they suggest? How can our appreciation of fashion, travel, food and medical history be advanced by looking at women’s involvement in sport? How can we use some of the current ideas and methodologies in the recent literature on the history and sociology of sport in order to look afresh at women’s participation? Jean Williams’s original research on these topics and more will be a useful resource for scholars in the fields of sports, women’s studies, history and sociology.
It's no secret that fun is important to American college students, but it is unusual for scholars to pay attention to how undergraduates represent and reflect on their partying. Linguist and anthropologist Chaise LaDousa explores the visual manifestations of collegiate fun in a Midwestern college town where house signs on off-campus student residences are a focal point of college culture. With names like Boot 'N Rally, The Plantation, and Crib of the Rib, house signs reproduce consequential categories of gender, sexuality, race, and faith in a medium students say is benign. Through his analysis of house signs and what students say about them, LaDousa introduces the reader to key concepts and approaches in cultural analysis.
Since Pauline Konga’s breakthrough performance at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, the world has become accustomed to seeing Kenyan women medal at major championships, sweep marathons, and set world records. Yet little is known about the pioneer generation of women who paved the way for Kenya’s reputation as an international powerhouse in women’s track and field. In Kenya’s Running Women: A History, historian and former professional runner Michelle M. Sikes details the triumphs and many challenges these women faced, from the advent of Kenya’s athletics program in the colonial era through the professionalization of running in the 1980s and 1990s. Sikes reveals how over time running became a vehicle for Kenyan women to expand the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Kenya’s Running Women demonstrates the necessity of including women in histories of African sport, and of incorporating sport into studies of African gender and nation-building.
Describes the significant part played by blacks and Native Americans at the beginning of the American Revolution.
The World of Indigenous North America is a comprehensive look at issues that concern indigenous people in North America. Though no single volume can cover every tribe and every issue around this fertile area of inquiry, this book takes on the fields of law, archaeology, literature, socio-linguistics, geography, sciences, and gender studies, among others, in order to make sense of the Indigenous experience. Covering both Canada's First Nations and the Native American tribes of the United States, and alluding to the work being done in indigenous studies through the rest of the world, the volume reflects the critical mass of scholarship that has developed in Indigenous Studies over the past dec...