“There will be a black Springbok over my dead body.” — Dr Danie Craven, President of the South African Rugby Board, 1969

Just a year after the controversial D’Oliveira affair, the organised disruption of the all-white 1969/70 South African rugby and cricket tours to Britain represented a significant challenge to apartheid politics. Led by future cabinet minister Peter Hain, the ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign brought about the cancellation of both tours, presaging white South Africa’s expulsion from the Olympics and the end of apartheid sport altogether.

With his brand of attention-grabbing, direct action sports protest, the 19-year-old Hain emerged as a hero to some and enemy to others. Now, reflecting on these experiences with fifty years of hindsight, Lord Hain, together with South Africa’s foremost sports historian and fellow anti-apartheid activist André Odendaal, shows how decades of relentless international and domestic campaigning for equality led to a Springbok team captained by black athlete Siya Kolisi winning the 2019 Rugby World Cup.

Interspersing a wide range of examples with personal testimony, Pitch Battles explores the themes of sport, globalisation and resistance from the deep past to the present day. Published in the same year as the Stop The Tour documentary from acclaimed director Louis Myles, this compelling story of sacrifice, struggle and triumph reveals how sport should never be divorced from politics or society’s values.

American living standards improved considerably between 1900 and 2000. While most observers focus on gains in per-capita income as a measure of economic well-being, economists have used other measures of well-being: height, weight, and longevity. The increased amount of leisure time per week and across people's lifetimes, however, has been an unsung aspect of the improved standard of living in America. In Century of the Leisured Masses, David George Surdam explores the growing presence of leisure activities in Americans' lives and how this development came out throughout the twentieth century. Most Americans have gone from working fifty-five or more hours per week to working fewer than forty, although many Americans at the top rungs of the economic ladder continue to work long hours. Not only do more Americans have more time to devote to other activities, they are able to enjoy higher-quality leisure. New forms of leisure have given Americans more choices, better quality, and greater convenience. For instance, in addition to producing music themselves, they can now listen to the most talented musicians when and where they want. Television began as black and white on small screens; within fifty years, Americans had a cast of dozens of channels to choose from. They could also purchase favorite shows and movies to watch at their convenience. Even Americans with low incomes enjoyed television and other new forms of leisure. This growth of leisure resulted from a combination of growing productivity, better health, and technology. American workers became more productive and chose to spend their improved productivity and higher wages by consuming more, taking more time off, and enjoying better working conditions. By century's end, relatively few Americans were engaged in arduous, dangerous, and stultifying occupations. The reign of tyranny on the shop floor, in retail shops, and in offices was mitigated; many Americans could even enjoy leisure activities during work hours. Failure to consider the gains in leisure time and leisure consumption understates the gains in American living standards. With Century of the Leisured Masses, Surdam has comprehensively documented and examined the developments in this important marker of well-being throughout the past century.

See the author featured in the "New Books in History" podcast:
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In Body by Weimar, Erik N. Jensen shows how German athletes reshaped gender roles in the turbulent decade after World War I and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. The same cutting-edge techniques that engineers were using to increase the efficiency of factories and businesses in the 1920s aided athletes in boosting the productivity of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity-quite literally-in its most streamlined, competitive, time-oriented form, and their own successes on the playing fields seemed to prove the value of economic rationalization to a skeptical public that often felt threatened by the process. Enthroned by the media as culture's trendsetters, champions in sports such as tennis, boxing, and track and field also provided models of sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self-determination. They showed their fans how to be modern, and, in the process, sparked heated debates over the aesthetics of the body, the limits of physical exertion, the obligations of citizens to the state, and the relationship between the sexes. If the images and debates in this book strike readers as familiar, it might well be because the ideal body of today-sleek, efficient, and equally available to men and women-received one of its earliest articulations in the fertile tumult of Germany's roaring twenties. After more than eighty years, we still want the Weimar body.

That men don't dance is a common stereotype. As one man tried to explain, "Music is something that goes on inside my head, and is sort of divorced from, to a large extent, the rest of my body." How did this man's head become divorced from his body? While it may seem natural and obvious that most white men don't dance, it is actually a recent phenomenon tied to the changing norms of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Combining archival sources, interviews, and participant observation, Sorry I Don't Dance analyzes how, within the United States, recreational dance became associated with women rather than men, youths rather than adults, and ethnic minorities rather than whites. At the beginning of the twentieth century and World War II, lots of ordinary men danced. In fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century dance was so enormously popular that journalists reported that young people had gone "dance mad" and reformers campaigned against its moral dangers. During World War II dance was an activity associated with wholesome masculinity, and the USO organized dances and supplied dance partners to servicemen. Later, men in the Swing Era danced, but many of their sons and grandsons do not. Turning her attention to these contemporary wallflowers, Maxine Craig talks to men about how they learn to dance or avoid learning to dance within a culture that celebrates masculinity as white and physically constrained and associates both femininity and ethnically-marked men with sensuality and physical expressivity. In this way, race and gender get into bodies and become the visible, common sense proof of racial and gender difference.

'Magnificent . . . Goldblatt is the doyen of sports historians and brings to this account his forensic and telling eye for detail'
Mail on Sunday

The epic exploration of society, politics, and economics in the twenty-first century through the prism of football, by the critically acclaimed author of The Ball is Round.

'David Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been'
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

In the twenty-first century football is first. First among sports themselves, but it now commands the allegiance, interest and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon. In the three most populous nations on the earth – China, India and the United States where just twenty years ago football existed on the periphery of society – it has now arrived for good. Nations, peoples and neighbourhoods across the globe imagine and invent themselves through playing and following the game.

In The Age of Football, David Goldblatt charts football’s global cultural ascent, its economic transformation and deep politicisation, taking in prison football in Uganda and amputee football in Angola, the role of football fans in the Arab Spring, the footballing presidencies of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, China’s declared intention to both host and win the World Cup by 2050, and the FIFA corruption scandal.

Following the intersection of the game with money, power and identity, like no previous sports historian, Goldblatt’s sweeping story is remarkable in its scope, breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, and is a brilliantly original perspective of the twenty-first century. It is the account of how football has come to define every facet of our social, economic and cultural lives and at what cost, shaping who we think we are and who we want to be.

"The Richardson boys ganged up with two other big families in their buildings and, at various ages, had tried out most of the local youth organisations. Bert Richardson with a suitable set of brothers and mates, was in the Scouts, but they got ejected. Later, at thirteen, he joined a boys' club for its boxing and football, and belonged on and off till he was sixteen. Then he suddenly dropped out." Why did Bert drop out? Originally published in 1954, the answer forms the substance of Some Young People, the report of an inquiry into adolescents' reactions to their local youth groups. Besides answering the question "Who joins what?" (and two thirds of these thousand youngsters of 14 to 17 were not members of any youth organisation) the book describes some of the hopes, pleasures and difficulties of such people as Frances, the chocolate packer, who has ambition to marry before long; and John, the carpenter's apprentice, whose passions are autocycling, pigeons and pigs. It also throws light on problems such as those presented by gangs; and suggests the importance of "my friends," the closely-knit set who mean so much to the adolescent.

This book provides a definitive and comprehensive contribution to the expanding body of research related to sport/physical culture and the COVID-19 global pandemic. By examining the generative complexities that simultaneously link and shape sport/physical culture and COVID, the book develops a collection of multi-faceted readings. The anthology is framed by an ontological understanding prefigured on relationality, liminality, and perpetual becoming. The contributions theoretically, methodologically and representationally explore COVID-sport assemblages as a dynamic and diverse "ad hoc grouping"of interpenetrating affecting elements, encompassing material and expressive forms, human and non-human, animate and inanimate matter. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and students and scholars of kinesiology, sociology of sport, critical studies of the body, physical education, sport and social issues, public health, physical cultural studies, sociology, foreign policy studies, and international studies.

Race and Sports: A Reference Handbook provides a breadth and depth of discussion about minority athletes, coaches, sports journalists, and others in U.S. sport. This volume examines race and sports and connected issues, from the integration of professional sports to the present day. It also explores the history of minority involvement in sports at every level: the barriers broken, the stereotypes that have been shattered, and the difficulties that these pioneers have endured. One of the most valuable aspects of the book is that it surveys the history of race and sports in a manner that helps readers identify key issues. An extensive background on the topic of race and sports, including a review of the history and an introduction to its technical aspects, is followed by a discussion of controversies, problems, and possible solutions. Essays from various contributors showcase different aspects of race and sports, while a substantial amount of the volume is dedicated to reference material - such as biographical sketches, a chronology, an extensive annotated bibliography, and a glossary - helpful in further study of the topic. Gives readers a solid foundation of the history of race and sports, from professional integration to present day Provides readers with a number of primary, secondary, and multimedia sources to continue expanding their knowledge on the topic of race and sports Discusses race and sports in a way that also acknowledges the intersectionality of gender and class in the sporting world Rounds out the author's expertise with perspective essays that offer readers a diversity of viewpoints

In this fifth book on sport and the nature of reputation, editors Lisa Doris Alexander and Joel Nathan Rosen have tasked their contributors with examining reputation from the perspective of celebrity and spectacle, which in some cases can be better defined as scandal. The subjects chronicled in this volume have all proven themselves to exist somewhere on the spectacular spectrum-the spotlight seemed always to gravitate toward them. All have displayed phenomenal feats of athletic prowess and artistry, and all have faced a controversy or been thrust into a situation that grows from age-old notions of the spectacle. Some handled the hoopla like the champions they are, or were, while others struggled and even faded amid the hustle and flow of their runaway celebrity. While their individual narratives are engrossing, these stories collectively paint a portrait of sport and spectacle that offers context and clarity. Written by a range of scholarly contributors from multiple disciplines, The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity, and Spectacle contains careful analysis of such megastars as LeBron James, Tonya Harding, David Beckham, Shaquille O'Neal, Maria Sharapova, and Colin Kaepernick. This final volume of a project that has spanned the first three decades of the twenty-first century looks to sharpen questions regarding how it is that reputations of celebrity athletes are forged, maintained, transformed, repurposed, destroyed, and at times rehabilitated. The subjects in this collection have been driven by this notion of the spectacle in ways that offer interesting and entertaining inquiry into the arc of athletic reputations. Contributions by Lisa Doris Alexander, Matthew H. Barton, Andrew C. Billings, Carlton Brick, Ted M. Butryn, Brian Carroll, Arthur T. Challis, Roxane Coche, Curtis M. Harris, Jay Johnson, Melvin Lewis, Jack Lule, Rory Magrath, Matthew A. Masucci, Andrew McIntosh, Jorge E. Moraga, Leigh M. Moscowitz, David C. Ogden, Joel Nathan Rosen, Kevin A. Stein, and Henry Yu.

The last decade has seen significant changes in global attitudes, policies and practices that impact the lives of trans people, but the world of sport has been slow to follow these initiatives. Contributors to this book document the formidable social-cultural and legal challenges facing trans athletes, particularly girls and women, at the global, national, and local levels, in contexts ranging from school sport to international competition. They demonstrate how proponents of trans exclusion rely on flawed or inconclusive science, selectively employed to support their purported goal of 'protecting women's sport'. Politicians in the US, UK, and elsewhere who have shown little interest in women or in sport exploit the issue to advance broader conservative agendas, while hostile mainstream and social media coverage exacerbates the problem. Bringing insights from sociology, philosophy, science and law, contributors present cogent analyses of these developments and explore the way forward, providing thoughtful and original recommendations for changes to policies and practices that are inclusive, innovative and democratic.

The most famous long-distance hiking trail in North America, the 2,181-mile Appalachian Trail - the longest hiking-only footpath in the world - runs along the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia to Maine. Every year about 2,000 individuals attempt to ""thru-hike"" the entire trail, a feat equivalent to hiking Mount Everest sixteen times. In Walking on the Wild Side, sociologist Kristi M. Fondren traces the stories of forty-six men and women who, for their own personal reasons, set out to conquer America's most well known, and arguably most social, long-distance hiking trail. In this fascinating in-depth study, Fondren shows how, once out on the trail, this unique subculture of hikers lives mostly in isolation, with their own way of acting, talking, and thinking; their own vocabulary; their own activities and interests; and their own conception of what is significant in life. They tend to be self-disciplined, have an unwavering trust in complete strangers, embrace a life of poverty, and reject modern-day institutions. The volume illuminates the intense social intimacy and bonding that forms among long-distance hikers as they collectively construct a long-distance hiker identity. Fondren describes how long-distance hikers develop a trail persona, underscoring how important a sense of place can be to our identity, and to our sense of who we are. Indeed, the author adds a new dimension to our understanding of the nature of identity in general. Anyone who has hiked - or has ever dreamed of hiking - the Appalachian Trail will find this volume fascinating. Walking on the Wild Side captures a community for whom the trail is a sacred place, a place to which they have become attached, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.

Sports are inspiring and uplifting. They can also bring out some of the worst characteristics in human nature: narcissism, prejudice, greed. This book looks at the major sports scandals in modern American history, from the Black Sox fix of 1919 to the current concussion crisis in the NFL. With today's digital media and the tremendous amount of money involved in sports, scandals are becoming more frequent and more damaging. How should a sports league respond to a scandal, act to protect the integrity of their organization, and address their many audiences-the fans, the media, and other players-when things go wrong? This book covers the big three sports-football, baseball, and basketball-to illuminate some of the biggest scandals in the history of American sports, using case studies to explain the scandals and the organizations' responses to crises. The work examines the major sports scandals in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the Black Sox fix of 1919, the institutional racism faced by Jackie Robinson in the late 1940s, the point-shaving scheme in 1950s-era college basketball, and unresolved crises that continue to damage sports today. Author Edward J. Lordan describes the historic conditions surrounding the scandals and administrators' responses to identifying, addressing and, when possible, resolving these crises. Presents detailed, definitive descriptions of famous sports crises, allowing readers to recognize the inaccuracies in the rumors surrounding these events in order to fully understand what happened Covers scandals and controversial situations that arose in professional and collegiate athletics Highlights how some of the smartest administrators in the public sphere have responded to an unexpected crisis Presents information of interest not only to sports fans and sports administrators but also to organizational communications professionals, crisis management professionals, public relations specialists, and general communication studies students

The Anthropology of Performance is an invaluable guide to this exciting and growing area. This cutting-edge volume on the major advancements in performance studies presents the theories, methods, and practices of performance in cultures around the globe. Leading anthropologists describe the range of human expression through performance and explore its role in constructing identity and community, as well as broader processes such as globalization and transnationalism. * Introduces new and advanced students to the task of studying and interpreting complex social, cultural, and political events from a performance perspective * Presents performance as a convergent field of inquiry that bridges the humanities and social sciences, with a distinctive cross-cultural perspective in anthropology * Demonstrates the range of human expression and meaning through performance in related fields of religious & ritual studies, folkloristics, theatre, language arts, and art & dance * Explores the role of performance in constructing identity, community, and the broader processes of globalization and transnationalism * Includes fascinating global case studies on a diverse range of phenomena * Contributions from leading scholars examine verbal genres, ritual and drama, public spectacle, tourism, and the performances embedded in everyday selves, communities and nations

In January 2014, President Barack Obama made headlines when he confided to New Yorker reporter Davis Remnick that, if he had a son, he would discourage him from playing in the NFL. "I would not let my son play pro football," he told the writer. Obama's words came on the heels of a year of heightened awareness of the life-long consequences of a professional football career. In August 2013, the NFL agreed to a $765 million settlement with over 4,500 retired players seeking damages for head injuries sustained during play. Thousands of others are seeking disability benefits in the Sate of California for on-field injuries. But the possibility of lifelong disability is not the only problem facing professional football players after their playing careers--often brief to begin with--come to an end. Many players, having spent years focusing on football, find themselves at sea when they either leave or are forced out of the NFL, without any alternate life plans or even the resources to make them. Is There Life After Football? draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives after their football days are over. It also incorporates stories about their playing careers, even before entering the NFL, to provide context for understanding their current situations.The authors begin with an analysis of the "bubble"-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, conditions that often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also examines the key issues affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries. From players who make reckless and unsustainable financial investments during their very few high-earning years, to players who struggle to form personal and professional relationships outside of football, the stories in the book put a very human face on the realities of the world of professional football. George Koonce Jr., a former NFL player himself, weaves in his own story throughout, explaining the challenges and setbacks he encountered and decisions that helped him succeed as an NFL Director of Player Development, PhD student, and university administrator after leaving the sport. Ultimately, Is There Life After Football? concludes that, despite the challenges players face, it is possible for players to find success after leaving the NFL if they have the right support, education, and awareness of what might await them. But players themselves must also resist being totally engulfed by the NFL culture in which they live. A fascinating study with unprecedented insider access, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the world of professional football.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these spots to make skate video, skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, skate video circulates rapidly through digital platforms to millions of viewers, enrolling spots from Shenzhen to Ramallah into an alternative cartography of Asia. This book explores this way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, and the implications for relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development.

Doping, as both practice and phenomenon, has largely been approached as a question of socio-cultural context and structures. Doping in Sport and Fitness argues that rigid differentiations between doping contexts - such as sport/fitness or elite/recreational - are less clear than it might seem. Breaking down these boundaries allows for a more complete understanding of substance use patterns, behaviours, and policy responses related to sport, fitness, and society. Contextual separations have greatly impacted how scholars have addressed the phenomena of doping in contemporary society, which in turn has impacted current anti-doping policies, preventative work, and harm reduction strategies globally. Bringing together research on doping and image and performance enhancement drug use (IPED) that highlights links between areas of doping research that have been previously separated, this collection includes contributions focusing on emerging and under-researched topics related to IPED use. Providing studies on new demographic groups of users, especially in terms of gender and age, Doping in Sport and Fitness suggests alternative ways of approaching the issue and supports providers such as coaches and drug service professionals.