When Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens opened in 1931, manager Conn Smythe envisioned an arena that would project an aura of middle-class respectability. In A Night at the Gardens, Russell Field shares how this new arena anticipated spectators by examining varying spectator behaviours, who the spectators were, and what the experience of spectating was like. Drawing on archival records, the book explores the neighbourhood in which Maple Leaf Gardens was situated, the design of the arena’s interior spaces, and the ways in which it was operated in order to appeal to respectable spectators at a particular intersection of class and gender. Examining a ticket ledger compiled by arena staff for the 1933–34 National Hockey League season, the book reveals that the average subscriber purchased more than two tickets, suggesting that attending hockey games was a social experience. It also shows that while ticket subscribers were overwhelmingly middle-class men, women were also present. Oral history interviews with twenty-one former spectators at the Maple Leaf Gardens detail the experience of watching the spectacle that unfolded on the ice during each hockey game. A Night at the Gardens tells the fascinating story of how one prominent public building became such an important part of Toronto society.

When Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens opened in 1931, manager Conn Smythe envisioned an arena that would project an aura of middle-class respectability. In A Night at the Gardens, Russell Field shares how this new arena anticipated spectators by examining varying spectator behaviours, who the spectators were, and what the experience of spectating was like. Drawing on archival records, the book explores the neighbourhood in which Maple Leaf Gardens was situated, the design of the arena’s interior spaces, and the ways in which it was operated in order to appeal to respectable spectators at a particular intersection of class and gender. Examining a ticket ledger compiled by arena staff for the 1933–34 National Hockey League season, the book reveals that the average subscriber purchased more than two tickets, suggesting that attending hockey games was a social experience. It also shows that while ticket subscribers were overwhelmingly middle-class men, women were also present. Oral history interviews with twenty-one former spectators at the Maple Leaf Gardens detail the experience of watching the spectacle that unfolded on the ice during each hockey game. A Night at the Gardens tells the fascinating story of how one prominent public building became such an important part of Toronto society.

Decolonizing Sport tells the stories of sport colonizing Indigenous Peoples and of Indigenous Peoples using sport to decolonize. Spanning several lands -- Turtle Island, the US, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Kenya -- the authors demonstrate the two sharp edges of sport in the history of colonialism. Colonizers used sport, their own and Indigenous recreational activities they appropriated, as part of the process of dispossession of land and culture. Indigenous mascots and team names, hockey at residential schools, lacrosse and many other examples show the subjugating force of sport. Yet, Indigenous Peoples used sport, playing their own games and those of the colonizers, including hockey, horse racing and fishing, and subverting colonial sport rules as liberation from colonialism. This collection stands apart from recent publications in the area of sport with its focus on Indigenous Peoples, sport and decolonization, as well as in imagining a new way forward.

1968 was a year of protest in civil society (Prague, Paris, Chicago) and a year of protest in sport. After a world-wide campaign, the anti-apartheid movement succeeded in barring South Africa from the Olympic Games, while US athletes from the Olympic Project for Human Rights used the medals podium to decry the racism of North America. Meanwhile, students in Mexico demonstrated against social priorities in Mexico, the host of the 1968 Games. These events contributed significantly to the rejection of the idea that sports are apolitical, and stimulated the scholarly study of sport across the social sciences. Leading up to the Beijing Olympic Games, similar dynamics were played out across the globe, while a campaign was underway to boycott the 'Genocide Olympics'. The volume, To Remember is to Resist, came out of a three-day conference on sports, human rights and social change hosted by the University of Toronto forty years after Mexico and eighty days before the Beijing Opening Ceremony. The contributions to this volume capture the memories of activists who were "on the ground" using sport as a site for the struggle for human rights and provide scholarly examinations of past and current human rights movements in sport. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

1968 was a year of protest in civil society (Prague, Paris, Chicago) and a year of protest in sport. After a world-wide campaign, the anti-apartheid movement succeeded in barring South Africa from the Olympic Games, while US athletes from the Olympic Project for Human Rights used the medals podium to decry the racism of North America. Meanwhile, students in Mexico demonstrated against social priorities in Mexico, the host of the 1968 Games. These events contributed significantly to the rejection of the idea that sports are apolitical, and stimulated the scholarly study of sport across the social sciences.

Leading up to the Beijing Olympic Games, similar dynamics were played out across the globe, while a campaign was underway to boycott the ?Genocide Olympics?. The volume, To Remember is to Resist, came out of a three-day conference on sports, human rights and social change hosted by the University of Toronto forty years after Mexico and eighty days before the Beijing Opening Ceremony.

The contributions to this volume capture the memories of activists who were "on the ground" using sport as a site for the struggle for human rights and provide scholarly examinations of past and current human rights movements in sport.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This book focuses on the major social and political forces that have shaped the ways in which sport has been understood, organized, and contested in an effort to engender social change. Integrating the history of international development with the history of modern sport, the authors examine the underpinnings of sport-for-development from the mid-19th through the early 21st centuries. Including both archival research and extensive interviews with more than 15 individuals who were central to the institutions and movements that shaped sport as a force for development, this book will be of particular interest to the growing number of scholars, students, practitioners, advocates and activists interested in the possibilities and limitations of sport-for-development.

Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature's rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork. Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals. Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life. A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability. Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

For more than forty years, scholars of the history and sociology of sport and recreation have studied how, no matter the time or place, sport is always more than just a game. In Playing for Change, leading scholars in the field of sports studies consider that legacy and forge ahead into the discipline's future. Through essays grouped around the themes of international and North American sport, including the Vancouver and Sochi Olympic Games; access to physical activity in Canadian communities; and the role of activism and the public intellectual in the delivery of sport, the contributors offer a comprehensive examination of the institutional structures of sport, physical activity, and recreation. This book provides wide-ranging examples of cutting-edge research in a vibrant and growing field.