Routledge Handbook of Sport History

The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is the latest of the publisher's ventures relative to sport studies. The editors admit that the “Handbook is neither encyclopedic nor definitive . . . it is introductory in nature” (391). Nevertheless, it is global in scope, contemporary, and innovative in its approach, building upon the previous works of sport historians. Each chapter provides an extensive bibliography of relevant works. The editors made astute decisions relative to inclusions and omissions, and they should be commended on their selection of contributors who are established international senior scholars as well as younger, emerging stars. The work covers the current state of sport historiography, the academic debates between sport historians and sport sociologists, and provides an abundance of photos analyzed as historical documents and tables.The book is divided into six parts, each addressing a particular theme in short chapters. Part 1 covers ethics with a view toward social responsibility, political engagement, and ideology. The authors ask questions such as, how do we derive meaning? How do we represent the past? What methodologies, theories, and sources drive analyses and conclusions? Considerable attention is given to the concept of reflexivity in sport history and the self-awareness and self-reflection of authors in their work. Incorporating concepts from other disciplines can enhance analysis, meaning, and creativity. Scholars must be aware that archives are not neutral repositories of unbiased knowledge. Indigenous sport histories, in particular, require alternative perspectives and engagement with oral history techniques.Part 2 covers perspectives and conceptualizations, with a particular focus on the evolving nature of the cultural turn that began in the late twentieth century. With that transformation, there has been a decline in emphasis on social history with an increased emphasis on language, text, and narrative. There is greater attention to material culture and depositories, such as halls of fame and sports museums, which require interpretation and offer different perspectives and representations. Likewise, historical fiction allows authors greater license to induce emotion, drama, and inspiration, which can better capture an incident or era while adhering to historical facts. Such interdisciplinary analysis, such as the merger of history and geography, has altered our perceptions and the regulation of time and space. Sport scholars have increased the visuality of the subject via films, photos, monuments, statues, art, and posters with new methods of observation and analysis.Sport history has increasingly become a call to greater political activism and a means to enact social change. Traditional topics can evince new arguments and produce new themes. More recent studies have furthered our corporeal knowledge, addressing topics such as gendered dynamics of sex testing and the racialization of bodies. Sports continue to emerge as a formidable political agent relative to power, human rights, responsibilities, and matters of race and gender at local, national, and international levels. Sport historians have shown that sports can both unite and divide societies due to national, ethnic, racial, and social class rivalries. The collaborative chapter on women's sport history, coauthored by Jaime Schultz, Michelle Sykes, and Cat Ariail offers an insightful list of ten possibilities relative to power, politics, and women's sport history that serves as a roadmap for future research.Part 3 covers emerging themes relative to the evolution of sport history. Digital sport history lends itself to statistical analysis and provides greater research efficiency and access to archival collections. Social media, such as blogs, grant access to wider audiences; but sport historians must be aware of potential legal and ethical issues inherent in digital usage. Teaching and learning sport history is directed at student-centered, practical, and experiential exercises. The ever-growing phenomenon of e-sports and its professionalization is covered in another chapter. Psychological and social theories are also addressed with attention to rituals, social control, nationalism, violence, and gender. Sport heritage studies involve nostalgia and alternative forms of representation in museums, halls of fame, memorials, and memorabilia, as well as the growing business of sport-based travel. A chapter on the new materialist sport history offers an alternative to texts in the conceptualization of space, time, and matter. Deaf and disabled sport gains attention, but terminology remains contested, and there are limited participation calls for greater scholarly input. Conversely, borderlands theory has assumed a more prominent role among sport history scholars who investigate the geographical, social, economic, and cultural boundaries of diffusion, which require an alternative gaze and multi-directionality.Part 4 is devoted to the much-needed exploration of indigenous sport histories, with five chapters that focus on settler colonialism, Maori culture, Australian Aborigines, Canadian lacrosse, and Native Americans in the United States. Researchers must overcome the bias of archival sources that provide only the voices of the dominant group and pay attention to oral history sources, such as Aboriginal yarning in Australia and the spirituality inherent in the sporting practices of North American tribes. In this regard, there is a great need for the recruitment of more indigenous scholars.Part 5 is an analysis of sport history journals, although social science and science journals that publish sport history articles are not included. The survey noted that there have been nineteen such journals published since the 1970s, seventeen of which are still ongoing, which bodes well for the subdiscipline. Three are among the top quartile in journal citations. The journals are published in ten different countries, although most are in the northern hemisphere. The journals’ workforce has been traditionally male, although women accounted for 30 percent in 2020. Authorship is still largely dominated by males as well (65–75 percent depending on the journal). English remains the lingua franca, in use by all the publications, which poses difficulties for non-English speaking scholars. Stadion publishes in German, English, and French. Materiales Para La Historia Del Deporte publishes articles in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Italian. Recorde, a free online Brazilian publication, is meant to address the English language hegemony, but publishes in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. In all cases, there has been a relative dearth of female leadership in the administrative roles.The neoliberal economic transition initiated in the 1970s has engendered a distinct emphasis on profit and auditing, which is tied to authors’ impact factor, often a requisite for tenure and promotion. The International Journal of the History of Sport is the only one that carries an impact factor. The devaluing of the humanities, in general, has had similar dire repercussions for sport historians.Part 6 offers concluding remarks by the coeditors on the past, present, and future of sport history. They address the myriad themes, ongoing debates and disagreements, and the dynamism of the subject, pointing to the changing nature of the field and the scholarship, which is continually evolving. On the whole, the handbook is a very successful enterprise that is informative, interesting, and necessary, a welcome addition for graduate students as well as established scholars.

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