Sport history now provides a burgeoning literature, exploring themes from aerobics to yachting. Though the field is in good health Douglas Booth argues that in comparison to most mainstream history, sport history has rarely been called upon to question the foundations of its historical knowledge.
In "The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History," Booth offers a comprehensive assessment of sport history as an academic discipline, exploring the ways in which professional historians can gather materials, construct and interrogate evidence and arguments, and present their stories about the sporting past.
- Part I examines theories of knowledge in sport history.
- Part II examines the uses of historical knowledge in popular and academic studies of sport history.
In advocating greater reflexivity and openness, "The Field "makes clear the need for a new rationale within sport history, and sets the agenda for the debate to come.
With a clear structure, sport-specific examples, summary tables and a detailed glossary of terms, The Field provides students, teachers and researchers in sport history with an unparalleled resource to tackle issues that are fundamental to the future of their subject.

* Explores cutting-edge methods, such as digital history, experimental history, and activism * Casts new light on central issues, such as race, gender, sexuality, nationalism * Introduces new themes in sport history, including borderlands, emotion, online gaming * The only sport history handbook to include a full section on indigenous sport history * International perspectives, with contributors from five continents

Australians are surrounded by beaches. But this enclosure is more than a geographical fact for the inhabitants of an island continent; the beach is an integral part of the cultural envelope. This work analyzes the history of the beach as an integral aspect of Australian culture.

In this book Douglas Booth takes a fresh look at the role of sport in the fostering of a new national identity in South Africa. It looks at the thirty-year course and the changes in the objectives of the sports boycott of South Africa. Black South Africans initially proposed the boycott as a strategy to integrate sport, and Western governments and international sporting federations such as the International Olympic Committee later applied the boycott with similar intentions. At first, South Africa's ruling National Party dismissed all demands to either integrate sport or extend political rights to blacks, but prolonged international isolation forced it to make concessions, and by the mid-1980s the government had accepted integrated sport. The international sporting community readmitted South Africa to competition in the early 1980s in acknowledgement of state president F W de Klerk's political initiatives and commitment to a universal franchise. Sport remains an integral element of post-apartheid politics. State president Nelson Mandela and his government believe that sport can unite black and white South Africans and contribute to social and political change. Indeed there have been moments, such as South Africa's victory in the 1995 World Rugby Cup, when unity through sport seemed possible. But through careful analysis Booth argues that sport will never unite South Africans except in the most fleeting and superficial manner.

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Other books in Series: Social Economics O'Boyle

This book presents a new perspective on the link between economic growth and environmental change. All the key issues in environmental economics are covered, including:
* industry, creation and environmental change
* air, water and toxic pollution
* economic growth and the limits of environmental regulation
* ethics and the limits of environmental economics.
The central thesis is that whilst new industries are necessary for economic growth, their development creates new environmental problems which become difficult to reverse. An alternative approach, 'steady-state economics', based on the concept of ethical commitment, is put forward as a possible alternative to a high-growth, environmentally destructive economy. Providing a welcome alternative to conventional, neoclassical microeconomic thought on environmental issues, this will be vital reading for students of environmental economics and related subjects.

Sport history now provides a burgeoning literature, exploring themes from aerobics to yachting. Though the field is in good health Douglas Booth argues that in comparison to most mainstream history, sport history has rarely been called upon to question the foundations of its historical knowledge.
In "The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History," Booth offers a comprehensive assessment of sport history as an academic discipline, exploring the ways in which professional historians can gather materials, construct and interrogate evidence and arguments, and present their stories about the sporting past.
- Part I examines theories of knowledge in sport history.
- Part II examines the uses of historical knowledge in popular and academic studies of sport history.
In advocating greater reflexivity and openness, "The Field "makes clear the need for a new rationale within sport history, and sets the agenda for the debate to come.
With a clear structure, sport-specific examples, summary tables and a detailed glossary of terms, The Field provides students, teachers and researchers in sport history with an unparalleled resource to tackle issues that are fundamental to the future of their subject.

1999 North American Society for Sports History Book of the YearDouglas Booth looks at the role of sport in the fostering of a new national identity in South Africa. He analyzes the effect of the 30-year sport boycott but concludes that sport will never unite South Africans except in the most fleeting and superficial manner.

Australians are surrounded by beaches. But this enclosure is more than a geographical fact for the inhabitants of an island continent; the beach is an integral part of the cultural envelope. This work analyzes the history of the beach as an integral aspect of Australian culture.

Bondi Beach is a history of an iconic place. It is a big history of geological origins, management by Aboriginal people, environmental despoliation by white Australians, and the formation of beach cultures. It is also a local history of the name Bondi, the origins of the Big Rock at Ben Buckler, the motives of early land holders, the tragedy known as Black Sunday, the hostilities between lifesavers and surfers, and the hullabaloos around the Pavilion. Pointing to a myriad of representations, author Douglas Booth shows that there is little agreement about the meaning of Bondi. Booth resolves these representations with a fresh narrative that presents the beach's perspective of a place under siege. Booth's creative narrative conveys important lessons about our engagement with the physical world.

The moving body-pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events-holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves-as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps-it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion-made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body's being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways. In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity-bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers-are not only meaningful, but ecological. By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.

Over the last decade extreme has become a popular adjective to describe a range of physical pursuits and activities such as bungee jumping, dirt biking, skysurfing and street luge. Yet, notwithstanding its widespread usage, extreme remains largely a connotative term to differentiate individualistic, adventure-type sports with high aesthetic components from more functional and traditional team sports such as baseball, basketball, cricket, football and hockey. However, as well as its physical characteristics extreme also connotes an ideological dimension that refers to a range of anti-social attitudes, many of which are embodied and stand in sharp contrast to conservative, mainstream middle-class sporting values. Indeed, the ideology of extreme attracts as much attention among scholars interested in the study of sport as the physical elements. The Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports offers a comprehensive dissection of this new and emerging phenomenon, and its characteristics, philosophy, ideology, functions, history and future. component-risk-from a number of disciplinary perspectives including history, sociology, psychology, theology and physiology. In examining the history of individual extreme sports, the Encyclopedia explores ancient, feudal and cross-cultural forms while also looking at the appeal of modern extreme activities to entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and the media as they seek to connect with consumers in the critical 13-34-age cohort. The commercialization of extreme sports as well as their institutionalization-formation of governing bodies, grand prix circuits, and inclusion in traditional mega-events such as the Olympic Games-highlights another critical dimension addressed by the Encyclopedia, their contradictory and paradoxical nature. As numerous commentators have observed, participants in extreme sports are typically no less racist, sexist and class and status conscious than their brothers and sisters participating in mainstream sports. cross-cultural and historical extreme sports; thematic essays; biographies of leading extreme exponents; descriptions of the best known extreme playgrounds.

Bondi Beach is a history of an iconic place. It is a big history of geological origins, management by Aboriginal people, environmental despoliation by white Australians, and the formation of beach cultures. It is also a local history of the name Bondi, the origins of the Big Rock at Ben Buckler, the motives of early land holders, the tragedy known as Black Sunday, the hostilities between lifesavers and surfers, and the hullabaloos around the Pavilion. Pointing to a myriad of representations, author Douglas Booth shows that there is little agreement about the meaning of Bondi. Booth resolves these representations with a fresh narrative that presents the beach's perspective of a place under siege. Booth's creative narrative conveys important lessons about our engagement with the physical world.