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The pernicious existence of race serves as the underlying force in modern societies. As such, the aim of this discussion is to postulate that leisure is a tool of racecraft: 1) the articula...

There is a great realization that a professor teaching an introductory or philosophical foundations course in the field of leisure studies comes to, if that professor may not be from the dominant culture of most Western societies. This realization is as stark as their numerical presence in their respective departments. Why are the philosophical foundations of the field devoid of the experiences, voices, and perspectives populations of color, or even more broadly, the populations of the global majority? And, why is there an absence of historical discussions on the field’s role in perpetrating or condoning activities that hindered or constrained populations of color full access, enjoyment, and articulation of leisure? As we move forward in the field more globally, thinking and discussing the new and progressive ways that we can conceive the sociology of leisure, it is imperative that we rethink our philosophical foundations in reconciliation of the potential harm it may have caused (and may continue to harm) and the actual good it can invoke in assisting the myriad of scholars who are pushing more progressive efforts for a critical leisure paradigm (Spracklen, Lashua, Sharpe and Swain, 2017). The objectives of this manuscript are: 1) to briefly categorize the research in the field on Race and ethnicity; 2) to outline the key canonical texts of the field; 3) to consider and reconceptualize a racially and ethnically inclusive foundation for the field utilizing The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study as an example; and, 4) to identify some of the specific areas that this change and inclusion would impact or realign the field’s history.

As a western social construction, our modern views of leisure were founded by the emergence of new French and British societies from the early 1700s to the late 1800s. The city, and the lifestyle that accompanied it, brought forth an articulation of a leisured society for all citizenry. The major capital campaigns, world fairs, open parks, public museums, cafes, shopping districts, and other edifices articulated what we now see as modern leisure spaces. However, within leisure texts little has been considered and discussed in how Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Imperial Colonialism, and Independence Debt led to the allowance of an emerging and expanding leisured class during and post-Industrial Revolution. What is articulated is an alternate historical interpretation that is intended to be the first in a series of critical commentaries on the: (1) European foundations of leisure; (2) leisure history centred on Europe; (3) financial gains from slavery, colonialism, and debts; and, (4) implications of revis...

Take this worldAnd all it's becomeI want to get out of this placeWe're all living under the sunWe're just staring into space… Popular SongNot long ago I began to think about how my parents separate...

One of the most horrific major events of human history only ended in the mid-1970s; to say that it is within living memory is to profoundly understate its ongoing social reality. Huge numbers of cu...

Sarah Alisabeth Fox begins her book, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West, with a brief but eerie anecdote from a woman who grew up downwind of the Nevada Test Site (NTS). The woman, Cl...

The proliferation of screen media and the saturation of everyday life with digital culture led to dramatic shifts in public communication, challenging our sense of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. Digital technologies have expanded the capacity to author and circulate information in unforeseeable ways. Cell phone video recordings became evidence of an unprovoked police attack, leaving traditional news outlets with little original content. Shifts in online engagement and mobile recording patterns at the turn of the century have enabled people who exist outside of business, state, and mainstream media sectors to create visible documentary moving image discourse that circumvent traditional media content. The standardization of the internet at the turn of the century brought people together in new ways, paving the way for social media and newly formed social networks. Visibility through digital production, online self-publishing, and circulation through social networks offer more than the opportunity to gather an audience; these forms of communication consistently disrupt, contribute, penetrate, challenge, focus, and reframe important public conversations in our culture. This chapter focuses on accidental witnessing of racial struggle and representation of police brutality in documentary history. This chapter has implications for what bodies get to move freely through a documentary commons and what bodies do not.

These are momentous times in Europe. Having said that, it's probable that I could have written the same sentence at any time since the concept of “Europe” arose, without raising too much controvers...

Turning away from star players and secret police surveillance, this article provides a history of East German football from below, examining the role of the people's game in shaping everyday life in the socialist state. Analyzing issues of class, gender, and youth culture as they related to three aspects of recreational football culture—men's workplace teams, women's football, and fan clubs—it argues that the sport, like few other leisure pursuits, illustrates the complex relationship between politics and pleasure in a one-party dictatorship. Football was an unusually visible, versatile, regular, and unpredictable means of giving voice and agency to ordinary East Germans, a place of multiple networks (both formal and informal) from which communist power was often excluded.

This article addresses the problem of the present-day historical discourse in Poland by taking under scrutiny one specific event: the historical re-enactment of the ethnic cleansing of Polish villagers by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, staged in a small town in southeastern Poland, Radymno, in the summer of 2013. It is based on research, carried out by the author and a group of students in Radymno and its surroundings in the period preceding and following the performance, as well as on content analysis of the press. The comparison of the top-down political and mass media discourse with local responses to the idea of re-enactment and, more broadly, local understandings of Polish–Ukrainian relations, reveal many contradictions. In attempting to understand them, the article discusses broader ramifications of the ‘democratization of history’: the political contestation, class rhetoric and societal tensions that are tangled up in historical debates.

In India there is a lamentable absence of planned historical writing, and in such writing as there is, a social perspective, in which the past’s links with the present are grasped, is often lacking. The ‘People’s History of India’ represents a welcome step; but it too makes substantive concessions to conventional archaeology and history. The titles Prehistory and Indus Civilization themselves are indicative of such concessions. Societies with modest archaeological remains are as important for us as those with more substantive ones. We need also to work back from how our people today live and think, in the manner of H.D. Sankalia and D.D. Kosambi.

Li Feng's (2013) Early China: A Social and Cultural History and Michael Parenti's (2003) The Assassination of Julius Caesar will be of interest to those concerned about the rise and fall of proleta...

A problem of folklore and authors’ fairy tales use as means of junior schoolchildren acquaintance with the Russian people’s history and household culture is discussed in this paper. Examples of fairy tales and technique of work with outdated terms and concepts which meet in these fairy tales are given. Material can widely be used at world around lessons when studying corresponding historical subjects.

In the summer of 1666, Cambridge's inhabitants found themselves in the midst of a plague epidemic that would kill 12 percent of the population. Evelyn Lord's study of the urban and social impact of...

This concluding chapter reviews the histories presented in the book and seeks out the commonalities and the contrasts between them. All share features with the sacred martyrdoms of earlier centuries. In each case the state’s response has also demonstrated common features: primarily, each martyrdom represents a failure of the state, either tactically or strategically. In England and Wales the role of a community in creating and sustaining a secular martyrdom has been primary, while in Ireland martyrdoms demonstrate the power of institutions such as the nascent Irish state. Each martyrdom has been not merely a drama but also an historically significant ‘event’, happening at a moment marked by new times and the emergence of new forces. As a result, a general history of secular martyrdom can be written.