A Brief History of American Sports

Study Guide

Below is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of information that you should be familiar with.  In the case of a quote from the text, be able to explain what the authors mean in the statement and how they support it.  Some of the names, terms, and questions may be covered in more than one chapter, and you should be aware of any additional information on these topics that was made available in lectures.

Chapter One: “Colonists at Play”

·         “context and meaning are everything”

·         recreational ideologies

·         cultural glue

·         male ideal

·         Puritan attitudes toward sport

·         popular recreations and social control

·         Social mixing

·         “the very beginnings of a critical shift” from paternalism to commercialized consumer culture

·         Social disorder versus the bonds of patriarchy

·         labor discipline

·         “The American colonies were heirs to England’s bifurcated leisure heritage”(16)

·         “The tobacco boom that began in the 1620s reinforced the play impulse”(19)

·         “England’s leisure ethic more than its work ethic became a compelling cultural ideal for

  Virginians”(21)

·         conspicuous consumption of play

·         “elite sports replicated in microcosm the reality of gentry society...”(23).

·         horse racing

·         cockfighting

·         eye-gouging matches

·         Public Times

·         “Popular recreations were one way that men located themselves in the status

  hierarchy...”(27).

·         rituals of manhood

·         honor

·         Southern ethic

·         “We must take care not to interpret the Southern ethic as aberrant or unique”(30)

·         “recreation”

·         studied moderation

·         Protestant work ethic

·         “A rough consensus seemed to make moderation a regional style”(35)

·         In “the booming cities of the middle colonies....we find the earliest glimmers of what American sports were to become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...”(37).

·         Publicans

·         elites “shared a cultural style”

Chapter Two: “‘Saints and Their Bodies’: Sport Through 1860"

·         rat baiting

·         new bourgeois culture

·         Victorianism

·         recreation transformed into entertainment

·         “The Fancy” – Bachelor subculture

·         homoeroticism and sport

·         pedestrianism

·         harness racing

·         sports clubs

·         “Baseball may well have been the most important sport of the antebellum era”(79)

·         poor physical condition of Americans

·         Muscular Christianity

·         “Sports...had begun to delimit middle-class American ideals of masculinity and femininity”(95)

·         sports and “character”

·         “The crucial fact is that reformed sports and recreations offered cultural solutions to a variety of social problems”(96)

Chapter Three: “`Vigorous, Manly, Out-of-Door Sports’: The Gilded Age”

·         the Civil War’s influence on sports

·         “sport” vs. “sports”

·         women’s sports

·         Social Gospel

·         YMCA

·         playground movement

·         public parks movement

·         “the modern concept of leisure”

·         “buying things, especially non-essentials and leisure goods, gradually became a prime source of identity and status”(108)

·         Albert G. Spalding

·         Modernization and sports

·         Richard Kyle Fox

·         National Police Gazette

·         eroticization of sports

·         “new ethic of pleasure”

·         John L. Sullivan

·         James J. Corbett

·         “Fancy” vs. “Fans”

·         Why was Gilded Age baseball increasingly attractive to members of ethnic groups and to young men in general?

·         National League

·         “Baseball replicated the conflicts of capitalism...(127).”

·         “Sport spectatorship was now part of the very definition of being a man in America”(128-29)

·         college football

·         athletic clubs

·         Amateur Ideal

·         country clubs

·         Gibson Girl

·         “Exclusive sports organizations...were part of a larger process of upper-class organization building”(136)

·         Social Darwinism

·         sports as “a moral equivalent of war”

·         “The Strenuous Life”

·         Theodore Roosevelt

·         “Sports ...made the new Darwinian worldview palpable”(148)

Chapter 4: “Sports With a Mission: Football and Basketball”

·         Walter Camp

·         Early history of college football

·         What did early football mean to the men who played it?

·         Alumni associations and their influence

·         “In a process that was not always conscious, sports helped transform colleges from bastions of Victorian provincialism into socializing institutions for a new elite…”(168).

·         Progressive views on organized play

·         The “discovery” of adolescence

·         Amos Alonzo Stagg, James Naismith, and Walter Halsey Gulick

·         The origins of basketball

·         The uses of basketball by social reformers

·         Why has basketball traditionally been “the preferred sport of working-class ethnic communities”(175)?

·         Be able to explain: Theory + game + key constituencies = accelerating movement for organized play

·         How did World War I affect the development of sports in America?

Chapter 5: “Play, Business, and Space: Sports and the Public Sphere”

·         “Sports may be the most powerful setting Americans have had in the twentieth century for expressing their relationship to place”(184).

·         “It is sometimes overlooked that the sense of place in American cities simply cannot have been terribly strong for most of their residents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”(186).

·         “The language of `disloyalty’ was handy”(186).

·         The notion of “home” in baseball

·         “Sporting language may have been one bridge by which Americans connected their family lives to the larger social world, and to a publicly proclaimed sense of place”(188).

·         What cultural shift was embodied by Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth?

·         Why have the 1920s become known as the “era of heroes”?  Who were the most famous of these heroes?

·         Sports and marketing

·         “Sports and entertainment have become indistinguishable”(196).

·         The Black Sox Scandal

·         “But increasingly, the machinery of image creation and distribution for national markets undermined the possibility of either group – famous athletes or fans – actually knowing the other”(197).

·         “How women were allowed to dress in public has much to do with what part of the public sphere they could inhabit”(198).

·         “Even the finest female athletes soon ran out of places to display their talents, and cultural pressures brought them back to more acceptable behavior”(201).

·          “The need of a mass society for detailed portraits of outstanding individuals helped create within modern sports a heavy emphasis on personal achievement”(202).

·         Why did “the worlds of sports and public relations” prefer individual women to women in groups?

·         Why have single women athletes been viewed as threatening?

·         Title IX

·         “So if by identifying with females, male coaches have become feminists of a sort, women’s athletics are now less controlled by women than they used to be”(206).

·         Billie Jean King

·         “Along with the ceremonies and conduct of war, sports in the public arena are the only place in which men are expected or permitted to express vulnerable emotions”(208).

·         Race, segregation, and public space

·         Negro League baseball

·         Jackie Robinson

·         Branch Rickey

·         Muhammad Ali

Chapter 6: “Money, Television, Drugs, and the Win: Dilemmas of Modern Sports”

·         “Like the love of money, the love of victory is extremely hard to limit voluntarily”(225).

·         “But in organized sports, winning has usually held more importance than sportsmanship, amusement, exercise, or patriotism”(228).

·         “Still, the influence of big-time sports, professional or ‘amateur,’ conveyed through television and the press, has a powerful effect on lower-level sports and tends to mold them along the lines of their own big-time structures”(229).

·         “By the 1920s, college football had become so popular, and had absorbed the investment of so much money, so much publicity, and so many people, that teams had achieved an existence virtually independent of the `educational’ institutions for which they played”(232).

·         What do the authors mean when they write that “for most Americans there is little compensation for the achievement that comes from being well rounded”(234).

·         “Because television networks make money by, in effect, renting audiences to advertisers, they have considerably less interest in the internal structures, particular histories and traditions, or distinctive rhythms of a given sport – except insofar as they affect the number of viewers”(237).

·         Roone Arledge and Monday Night Football

·         “That athletes move and live in a different world invites them to think of themselves as living by different rules”(243).

·         Alcohol and drug use in sports

·         The Reserve Clause

·         What do the authors mean when they talk about the “assumption that our bodies can be objectified in the most extreme ways in order to attain the desired end, victory over and opponent”(248)?

·         “Attaching the cultural desire for victory to the capitalist imperative of making money has had inescapable consequences during the twentieth century”(248).

Epilogue

·         “The history of American sports reveals that motives were never pure; there were no `good old days’ when people played only for the honor of their town or the love of the game”(252).