You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This text looks at how an understanding of rugby can provide insight into what it has meant to "be a man" in societies influenced by the ideals of Victorian upper and middle classes. It shows that rugby has been a means of promoting male exclusivity, but also been a means of cultural incorporation.
What prompts common people to kill a guard and rob an office they thought had some tickets for a Test match? Why does a scholar of medieval Bengali literature remark, 'Had life been a sport, it would be cricket'? Who do journalists vindicate by promoting cricket, the imperial game par excellence, as the lifeforce of the ordinary Indian? This book pursues these threads of the people's uncanny attachment to cricket, seeking to understand the sport's role in the making of a postcolonial society. With a focus on Calcutta, it unpacks the various connotations of international cricket that have produced a postcolonial community and public culture. Cricket, it shows, gave the people a tool to understand and form themselves as a cultural community. More than the outcomes of matches, the beliefs, attitudes and actions the sport generated had an immense bearing on emerging social relationships.
This book delves into the complex, yet fascinating evolution of football. From a relatively unruly mob game played on festival days, the game was adopted, codified and 'civilised' by the major English Public Schools and then diffused into the wider society to become a codified, modern sports-form. The birth of the Football Association in 1863 in London provided compromise rules, enabling teams geographically divided by distance and football's differing interpretations to oppose each other, which marked a pivotal moment for the sport. Thereon, history records the establishment of the FA Cup, football's internationalisation, the advent of professionalism and, perhaps finally, the establishment...
This book presents a synthesis of the work on early football undertaken by the authors over the past two decades. It explores aspects of a figurational approach to sociology to examine the early development of football rules in the middle part of the nineteenth century. The book tests Dunning’s status rivalry hypothesis to contest Harvey’s view of football’s development which stresses an influential sub-culture outside the public schools. Status Rivalry re-states the primacy of these latter institutions in the growth of football and without it the sport’s story would remain skewed and unbalanced for future generations.
Boxing was phenomenally popular in 18th and 19th century Britain. Aristocrats attended matches and patronized boxers, and the most important fights drew tens of thousands of spectators. Promoters of the sport claimed that it showcased the timeless and authentic ideal of English manhood--a rock of stability in changing times. Yet many of the best fighters of the era were Irish, Jewish or black. This history focuses on how boxers, journalists, politicians, pub owners and others used national, religious and racial identities to promote pugilism and its pure English pedigree, even as ethnic minorities won distinction in the sport, putting the diversity of the Empire on display.
In recent decades Africa has emerged as a sporting giant. The African sporting phenomenon has been addressed in the popular press and it has also attracted scholarly interest; however, this interest is almost entirely focussed on men. Yet women’s participation in recreational and elite sport is worthy of exploration and research. This path-breaking collection of essays provides an introduction to a variety of dimensions of women’s participation in African sports. Several key concepts are addressed in the book: women and media, women and sport-migration, sport and empowerment, sporting and social development, women’s sport and postcolonial Africa, and professional sport and economic development. This collection, authored by established scholars, will attract readership from students from Sports Studies to African Studies and from undergraduate students to university teachers. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)
Questions have recently been raised about the political consequences a state experiences when hosting an international sporting event. As the Olympics and FIFA World Cup have visited Brazil and Russia, and the latter is slated to visit Qatar, issues regarding human rights, poverty, and human trafficking have seemingly appeared as frequently in media coverage as the results of competition. This text begins to build an understanding of just how a state’s human rights are influenced by both the want and actual experience of hosting. It finds that hosts behave differently when the eyes of the world are on them and that these events do produce positive effects on a state’s level of respect for human rights. Yet, it also identifies those areas in which hosts, organizations like the IOC and FIFA, and the international sports regime can help to strengthen and expand human rights