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The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is a new and innovative survey of the discipline of sport history. Global in scope, it examines the key contemporary issues in sports historiography, sheds light on previously ignored topics, and sets an intellectual agenda for the future development of the discipline. The book explores both traditional and non-traditional methodologies in sport history, and traces the interface between sport history and other fields of research, such as literature, material culture and the digital humanities. It considers the importance of key issues such as gender, race, sexuality and politics to our understanding of sport history, and focuses on innovative ways that the scholarship around these issues is challenging accepted discourses. This is the first handbook to include a full section on Indigenous sport history, a topic that has often been ignored in sport history surveys despite its powerful upstream influence on contemporary sport. The book also reflects carefully on the central importance of sport history journals in shaping the development of the discipline. This book is an essential reference for any student, researcher or scholar with an interest in sport history or the relationship between sport and society. It will also be fascinating reading for any historians looking for fresh perspectives on contemporary historiography or social and cultural history.

Muhammad Ali’s name is one of the most significant yet understudied aspects of the great boxer’s extraordinary life. Throughout his career, journalists used Ali’s birth name (Cassius Clay) and his Islamic name (Muhammad Ali) to transmit their attitudes toward him. This study interrogates trends in newspaper usage of Ali’s two names during the 1960s and 1970s as a way to understand changing public attitudes toward him during this period. It does so via a distant reading of 37,911 digitized newspaper articles obtained from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. By quantitatively visualizing trends and patterns in the usage of the two names, this study reveals that American journalists did not embrace Ali’s chosen name until 1971. Acceptance of the name in the press was not gradual but was instead characterized by intense shifts at key points in Ali’s career. Finally, this paper addresses the value of digital history—specifically, distant reading—for sport history scholars.

For Australian Indigenous women, especially those who lived on settlements and missions, participation in the male preserve of sport was doubly shaped by colonization and by Western notions...

The policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people in Australia had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. The Australian states, which were primarily responsible for Aboriginal affairs, adopted many different forms of assimilation. In Queensland, assimilation was predominantly carried out through the extensive system of missions and settlements that the state had heavily invested in since the late colonial era. This paper examines the role of extra-curricular activities, particularly sport, that emerged out of Queensland's Aboriginal institutions in the government-driven strategies to promote assimilation. The focal point is the women's only sport of Marching Girls and the marching teams that were formed at the government settlement of Cherbourg, north-west of Brisbane. Using spatial history and document analysis, the Marching Girls are a case study to examine the complexity of assimilation as the policy was filtered through the Queensland government apparatus, to investigate the intersection between sport, gender and assimilation, and to explore how women's participation in extra-curricular activities provides insights into the assimilation project at local, state and even national levels.

Australian sports historiography, in privileging Western, reconstructionist approaches to narrating histories of Aboriginal sport, has overlooked Indigenous research methodologies that privilege Aboriginal voices. This paper adopts the Indigenous research methodology of yarning in a collaborative project with former sportswomen from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland. Yarning, as a culturally respectful way of eliciting memories and valuing expression of Indigenous voices, was used to explore their experiences, memories and meanings of competitive marching, a popular sport for young women in mid-twentieth century Australia. The yarning sessions revealed insights into sport that are missing from the empirical, archival record, and allowed the exploration of agency and autonomy, acts of resistance, and complex intersections of nostalgia and trauma. This paper offers specific and broader insights on sport in Australian Indigenous communities and on the entanglement of the sporting past with the histories and politics of race and gender in Queensland. In repositioning researcher and researched in Aboriginal sport history, this paper demonstrates the potential of transformative narratives about the experiences of Indigenous Australians.

This paper reviews the historiography of Australian indigenous sport. The historiography geographically and culturally emphasizes Aboriginal athletes over Torres Strait Islanders and temporally concentrates on the late 19th and late 20th centuries over the Protection Era that spanned much of the 20th century. In the contemplation of the historiographical silences, Whiteness and critical race theory (CRT), along with other strands of indigenous studies and decolonizing methodologies, are useful tools. Whiteness foregrounds Western epistemological perspectives and modes of knowledge presentation in professionally approved written outputs such as books, articles, and theses. CRT highlights the intricate workings of cultural forms such as sport and ways that Aboriginal people negotiate race and racism within particular cultural and social structures. These dimensions of Whiteness and CRT help demonstrate how and why Aboriginal sport history contributes to understanding race relations in Australia.

Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This paper investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women’s surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading.

The emerging field of digital humanities offers many potential innovations for historians, but also generates a host of methodological and philosophical challenges and issues. This article focuses on one feature of digital humanities, distant reading, to analyse the history of women's surfing in Australia in the early twentieth century. As a form of quantitative analysis involving data mining and visual representations, distant reading is used in tandem with traditional historical research methods to deconstruct the mythology of early Australian surfing. The article argues for the value of blending digital technologies with traditional qualitative methods to reveal new historical insights.

So much has been lost about the culture of Australia's Indigenous people. Their languages, traditions and heritage were dissipated under the process of white colonization from 1788. This paper investigates the actions of the people from Cherbourg, an Aboriginal settlement in southeast Queensland, Australia, to reclaim their culture, identity and heritage. The focus is specifically on the Ration Shed Museum (RSM), which officially opened in Cherbourg in 2004. The RSM is a particular type of Indigenous museum, a community museum, in which those who curate the museum are simultaneously its subjects. Through a combination of ideas drawn from new museology, critical heritage and cultural geography, the relationships between the three buildings of the museum – the Ration Shed, the Superintendent's Office and the Boys’ Dormitory – and the displays of sport are examined via the voices of Cherbourg people. The buildings evoke stories of surveillance, discipline, punishment and control and, in many ways, sport mirr...

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the voices of women recreational surfers to explore the changes which may or may not be occurring at smaller, more localised levels of women's engagement with surfing culture. An ethnographic methodology was employed to ask women how and why they engage in surfing and what it means for them, rather than asking questions based on existing assumptions. In presenting the data we draw upon the double meaning afforded by the term ‘to patronise’ as a means of framing the complex ways that women continue to be differentiated in surfing culture, and the ways they respond to t...

The Black Power Salute protest by athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal dais during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, supported by silver-medallist Peter Norman, has been recognised as a seminal moment in sports history, Olympic history and race relations. This article examines the filmic history of this event as represented in Salute, a 2008 film documentary. We argue that understanding contemporary films requires more than an analysis of on-screen representations and is vastly enriched through embracing the ways in which films are circulated between producers, directors, advertisers, merchandisers and audiences. Accordingly, this article combines a textual analysis of Salute with an exploration of how new media influence the dissemination, reception and consumption of the film. The textual analysis explores Salute as a documentary film biography through dominant narratives and documentary strategies that characterise this genre of filmic history. Associated new media are considered from t...

Among a multitude of social memory representations of Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser are several films, including a 1979 biopic, Dawn! This paper considers this feature film alongside other examples of filmic history, most particularly a 1964 documentary, The Dawn Fraser Story. While documentaries are generally valued more highly by historians than movies because of the perceived similarity of endeavour between documentary makers and written historians, in this case the biopic is more compelling because its narratives resonate more strongly with Fraser's role in swimming history, her connection with major national stereotypes and her position as a living sporting icon. In particular, Dawn! encapsulates a dominant, yet mythical, feature of Australian identity – the larrikin – through representations of Fraser as an anti-authoritarian, working-class ‘battler’. Simultaneously, however, the movie disrupts this larrikin portrayal through its depiction of Fraser's sexuality, and in particular a lesbian ...

Australia and, more specifically, a Solomon Island schoolboy named Alick Wickham, are credited with creating the swimming racing stroke, the crawl, or freestyle as it is known in contemporary parlance. Wickham's contribution constitutes a popular, celebrated and enduring legend. While there is some factual basis to the legend, Wickham's contribution is a sport creation myth. The myth offers an example of the intersection of sport and constructions of Pacific islanders in the racial discourse of the Federation period. As a cultural discourse, the myth reflects how Wickham was accommodated as an exoticised islander and socially acceptable ‘black’ sportsman.

Solomon Islander swimmer Alick Wickham is a celebrated figure in Australian, Solomon Islander and international sport history. His iconic status is inextricably linked to the myth that he introduced the crawl stroke, commonly known as freestyle, to Australia and hence the wider world. The focus of this paper is not the mythic qualities of Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke, but rather how this myth has been enmeshed in a range of discourses. Through the lens of postcolonialism and by focusing on the creation of social memory — in literature, postage stamps and documentaries — Wickham's contribution to the crawl stroke has been represented in three dominant ways: as a racial discourse centring on the social construction of the ‘nimble savage’, as part of Australian nationalism in terms of the nation's contribution to world swimming, and as a discernible dimension in the construction of Solomon Islander identity after independence.

This article compares the Golden Girls of Sport calendar, which was ostensibly launched to provide Australian women competing in the 1996 Olympic Games with greater access to the media, with a special issue of black+ white magazine, titled The Atlanta Dream, which featured Australian men and women competitors at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The two publications are analysed in the context of gender theory, with particular focuses on the social construction of gendered bodies and the different ways that femininity and masculinity are represented in the mass media.

Rugby league was established as a modern sport in Australia in 1907 and has always functioned as a commodity. This article examines the forces that have contributed to the commodification of the game and their impact on three key elements of the sport's culture: the internal structure of rugby league, its administrative and organisational structures, and conditions for players. In the process, the article engages with postmodernist emphases on contradiction and disjuncture and concludes that the transformations wrought in rugby league cannot be characterised either as simple continuities or as abrupt discontinuities.

(1998). From independence to a reconstituted hegemony: Rugby league and television in Australia. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 22, Everyday wonders, pp. 134-147.

This study uses figurational theory to analyse the articulations between standards of violence control and commodification in Australian rugby league between 1970 and 1995. It is argued that the interdependent social processes of violence regulation and commodification cannot be reduced to a simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Instead, it is imperative to comprehend that myriad social processes interweave to produce fluctuating standards of violence. The major social processes that are addressed include TV, technization, surveillance technologies, judicial structures, negative and positive feedback cycles, marketing and tension-balance.

Foreword Kevin Moore. Introduction: Historians in Sport Museums Murray G. Phillips Making Meaning 1. A Racehorse in the Museum: Phar Lap and the New Museology Mark O'Neill and Gary Osmond 2. Beyond Sport Heroes' Celebration: On the Use of Sportswear for Sport History Thierry Terret 3. Not So Much a Sport Museum: The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies Douglas A. Brown Corporate Museums 4. Croke Park: Museum, Stadium and Shrine for the Nation Mike Cronin 5. Le Musee Olympique: Epicentre of Olympic Evangelism Daryl Adair 6. Renamed, Refurbished and Reconstructionist: Comparisons and Contrasts in Four London Sports Museums Wray Vamplew Post-Museums 7. The Hall, Wall and Page of Fame Colin Tatz 8. Looking for the 'Marvellous' in Baltimore: A Sport History Sojourn Daniel A. Nathan 9. Bondi Park: Making, Practicing and Performing a Museum Douglas Booth 10. Lest We Forget: Public History and Racial Segregation in Baltimore's Druid Hill Park Jaime Schultz. Conclusion Murray G. Phillips

This is the book that students and lecturers in sports studies have been waiting for. It is the most comprehensive student introduction to the field. The book is organized around four themes central to the study of sport: perspectives, inclusion, commercialization and international context and comparison. Key features include 1. A strong inter-disciplinary perspective; 2. A clear focus on power and inequality and their relation to participation and success in sport; 3. A keen emphasis on the increasing importance of commercialization and regulation in sport; and 4. An exemplary introduction into the importance of comparative analysis for understanding problems clearly and producing sound solutions. This is an ideal teaching text, enabling lecturers to teach a conventional 12 or 13 week semester by selecting issues from the 19 topic-based chapters. Accessible, engaging and full of up to date ideas and information the book will be devoured by lecturers seeking an authoritative introduction to sport and society and relished by students who want a relevant, enriching texts for the learning and research needs. [Book Synopsis]

When World War Two finished, there was a collective sigh of relief with the promise of a less strife-torn world. The 1950s and 1960s, though, were almost as tumultuous as the previous decade. More wars, political coups, nuclear threats, assassinations, decolonisation and revolutions in popular culture shattered any notions of social, political and economic tranquillity. Sport, too, was caught up in the turmoil. Not only were Germany and Japan pariahs in international competitions, but there were also revolutions in the way sport was conceived, organised and managed. The emergence of sports medicine and sports science in Australia were part of the reconceptualisation of sport that, like the broader political context, suffered from tensions that often erupted into enduring conflicts. This presentation examines the tensions and conflicts in the emergence of sports medicine in Australia. The nascent sports medicine organisations had to resolve political struggles for power between New South Wales and Victorian entities, and had to determine the criteria for membership of the Australian Sports Medicine Federation—a hotly contested issue. Similarly, a key component of sports medicine, sport science was in an embryonic stage of development and confronting the concept of “the body as a machine” as coaches battled over experimentation with athletes and radically different paradigms of training regimes. As much as sport medicine practitioners and sport scientists were fighting internal battles, both struggled with Australian sporting organisations which were responsible for athletes at the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games. Gaining recognition from Olympic and Commonwealth Games officials was a long, hard-fought battle for sports medicine practitioners, sport scientists and coaches. In many ways, the struggles of the decades following World War Two helped shape the roles of contemporary sports medicine, sport science and coaching in Australian sport.

Until the past few years few educators have made a sharp distinction between a curriculum and the means of achieving whatever goals that curriculum had set up; it was assumed that the essential ingredients were simply the teacher and the curriculum guide. The guide indicated to the teacher what needed to be done and the teacher, with the help of a few "aids," would then implement the curriculum. The selection of the aids to be used was usually left to the teacher, although many curriculum guides did, and still do, indicate lists of resources available for use, on an optional basis, by the teacher. The concept that instructional and learning materials are mere aids which may or may not be appended to ongoing instructional procedures at the pleasure of the individual teacher has in recent years come under ever more searching analysis. This analysis has sought to achieve a better understanding of the proper place of learning materials in the fabric of the educational process. Are the materials "aids," or are they "indispensables"? One of the outstanding modern attempts to fashion a coherent assemblage of learning resources, specifically designed from their inception to be used with and make possible the implementation of a new curriculum, was the development by the Physical Science Study Committee of a new physics curriculum and a package of accompanying materials, including print and nonprint media. In the light of recent development in the field of instructional materials, this attempt must be viewed as only a bare beginning, a single step along the road to an understanding of the complex interrelationships which obtain between learning and instruction on the one hand and teachers, pupils, media, structures, and school organization on the other.