A few miles from New Orleans, at LaSalle's Landing - in what is now the city of Kenner - stands a life-size bronze statue of two men in combat. One of them is the legendary Gypsy Jem Mace, the first Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World and the last of the great bare-knuckle fighters. This is the story of Jem Mace's life. Born in Norfolk in 1931, between his first recorded fight, in October 1855, and his last - at the age of nearly 60 - he became the greatest fighter the world has ever known. But "Gypsy" Jem Mace was far more than a champion boxer: he played the fiddle in street processions in war-wrecked New Orleans; was friends with Wyatt Earp - survivor of the gunfight at the OK Corral (who refereed one of his fights), the author Charles Dickens; controversial actress Adah Mencken (he and Dickens were rivals for her affection); and the great and the good of New York and London high society; he fathered numerous children (the author is his great-great-grandson), and had countless lovers, resulting in many marriages and divorces.Gypsy Jem Mace is not simply a book about boxing, but more a narrative quest to uncover the life of a famous but forgotten ancestor, who died in poverty in 1910. This is a story that deserves to be told, one that will resonate with anyone, young or old, man or woman, who has ever sought to do something special before the light of life starts to dim.

LaVern Roach, a skinny kid from the small town of Plainview, Texas, rose from obscurity to become one of boxing's most popular figures during the 1940s. Roach's rise to prominence occurred during an era when boxing shared the spotlight with baseball as the nation's top two professional sports. As a result of Roach's death- which marked the first nationally televised fight during which a boxer died from injuries received in the ring-the sport of boxing came under closer scrutiny by the general public than ever before. West Texas Middleweight is the story of Roach's all too brief journey from a West Texas amateur, to enlistment in the US Marines, where he captained the nation's most successful military boxing team, to becoming a Madison Square Garden main eventer. He received the distinction of being named The Ring Magazine's "Rookie of the Year" for 1947 and was considered a top ten contender for the middleweight championship of the world. This book chronicles Roach's road to his final fight-and it explains why, as noted by legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, "boxing changed because of LaVern Roach."

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Boxing is a traditional sport in many ways, characterized by continuities in the form of practices and regulations and heavy with legends and heroes reflecting its traditional/historical values. Associations with class, hegemonic masculinity and racialized inclusions/exclusions, however, sit alongside developments such as women's boxing and involvement in Mixed Martial Arts. This book will be the first to use boxing as a vehicle for exploring social, cultural and political change in a global context. It will consider to what degree and in what ways boxing reflects social transformations, and whether and how it contributes to those transformations. In exploring the relationship it will provide new ways of thinking critically about the everyday.