Mark Dyreson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1450652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Dyreson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Dyreson |
| SIGNATURE | DYRESON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4792-1072 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Inaugurating ‘Good Feeling between the United States and South Africa’: The 1931 All-White Tour of South Africa
In 1931, a track and field team sponsored by the American Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) toured South Africa, the first official visit of a US team to the African nation. The AAU fielded an all-white squad in this inaugural tour, even though African Americans held several world records in a variety of events during this era. Though it was not clear that US and South African officials explicitly coordinated to draw a colour line on the tour, it was …
Excavating the Ancestry of ‘Globetrotting’: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the…
During the twentieth century, systems of racial segregation flourished in both the United States and South Africa. Crusades for racial equality aimed at dismantling racial boundaries emerged in both nations. Sport played a key role in these endeavours. Drawing colour lines in athletic competitions reinforced ideologies of white supremacy while demanding racial equality in sporting contests fuelled campaigns challenging segregation. In an American…
Athletes for Peace’? From the Quest to Hold the Mavericks Accountable to a Second American Rebel Tour of South Africa
We Do Not Divide Our Champions According to Color’: A Failed 1938 All-White Follow-Up Tour of South Africa
In 1938 the American Amateur Athletic Union proposed a return tour of athletics stars to South Africa, recalling a 1931 trip as well as several return tours by South Africans to the US as important ventures. By the late 1930s African American athletes had become globally prominent icons of their nation, most famously Jesse Owens but also many others. US sporting bureaucrats announced the team would be selected at the 1938 national athletics champ…
I Consider Myself a Political Prisoner’: The Long and Strange Journeys of American Rebels Enmeshed in Ironies of the Athletes’ Rights Crusade
Flaunting international anti-apartheid bans, two groups of American track and field ‘rebels’ toured South Africa in the late 1980s. In defending their incendiary treks, they asserted their rights both to act on their own political principles and to earn a paycheck. Heavily criticized by a global coalition that supported the South African athletic embargoes, they were punished with long suspensions and public humiliation. A few of the ‘rebels’ rem…
I See the Struggle against Race Supremacy and Racial Inequality as World-Wide’: Anti-Apartheid Campaigns, Civil Rights Struggles, and the 1961 Track and Field Tours of South Africa
As the Civil Rights Movement in the US reached its apogee and apartheid in South Africa cemented its grip, the American Amateur Athletic Union in 1961 announced plans to send a team of athletics all-stars to the African nation. Following tours of South Africa by all-white American teams in 1931 and 1950, as well as a 1938 tour scuttled by racial disagreements, the 1961 proposal drew fire from Civil Rights leaders and anti-apartheid activists. In …
A Democracy That Will Know Not the Differences of Race’: American ‘Globetrotting’ in South Africa from the 1920s through the 1980s in Perspective
When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, these periodic sporting encounters served as lightning rods that rallied civil rights activists and anti-apartheid protestors, linking battles ov…
Winners, Regardless’: Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles, and the 1950 Track and Field Tour of South Africa
In 1950 as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momentum in the US and apartheid policies hardened in South Africa, the American Amateur Athletic Union sponsored a tour by US track and field all-stars to South Africa. The controversial 1950 venture, following an original 1931 trek and a 1938 trip cancelled after objections to the exclusion of Black athletes from the team, drew hostile fire from a variety of groups in the US went it leaked to the pr…
We Didn’t Kill Any Babies’: The 1988 Rebel Track and Field Tour of South Africa
Just after the 1988 Seoul Olympics concluded, a handful of US athletes defied national and international customs and codes and accepted invitations to compete in South Africa, then a pariah state barred from international athletic competitions by almost every global sporting organization. The sporting boycotts represented one phalanx of the decades-long campaign to isolate South Africa until it dismantled apartheid. The US team included both whit…
New Dimensions of Sport in Modern Europe: Perspectives from the ‘Long Twentieth Century’
This collection offers new perspectives on European sport history in the ‘long twentieth century’ designed to challenge and deconstruct what might be considered ‘traditional’ or more familiar Euro-centric conceptions and geographies of sport and leisure—especially those deriving from the leading hotbeds of European sport history. This special issue introduction adds to the growing corpus of explorations of sport and leisure in late-modern Europea…
Anomaly or Harbinger? Penn State’s 1935 Female ‘Letter “Man”’ and New Frontiers in the History of Women’s Intercollegiate Sport in the United States
In 1935, Pennsylvania State University fielded a men’s varsity tennis team that included a woman, Dorothy Anderson. In an era in which only college women at single-sex institutions supposedly played intercollegiate sports, Anderson represented a startling anomaly. She briefly became a national celebrity for earning a varsity ‘S’ from Penn State. Anderson, however, was not merely an anomaly. Inspired by her example, women joined men’s tennis varsi…
Looking Backward and Forward from the 24-Million-Word Mark: A Managing Editor’s Perspective on The International Journal of the History of Sport in Transition
With the completion of volume 36, the 2019 run of The International Journal of the History of Sport, this periodical has since 1984 published more that 24-million words. To mark that occasion, the current Managing Editor looks to the past, present, and future of The International Journal of the History of Sport. After a brief sketch of the trials and tribulations in the journal’s publishing history, the Managing Editor outlines an extensive refor…
The Californization of Olympian Love: Olga Fikotová and Harold Connolly’s Cold War Romance
At the height of the Cold War, as nuclear Armageddon between the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc loomed, a ray of hope appeared at the 1956 Olympics. An American gold medalist named Harold Connolly and a Czech gold medalist named Olga Fikotová fell in love. After a whirlwind courtship in front of the world press corps, they married and migrated to the United States, becoming global celebrities. They eventually settled near the golden beaches of…
The Super Bowl as a Television Spectacle: Global Designs, Glocal Niches, and Parochial Patterns
In the contemporary US, the Super Bowl creates the largest ‘shared experience’ in the nation. More people tune into these spectacles than attend worship services, vote in elections, or celebrate traditional holidays. Super Bowls have become such powerful elements in US national culture that television corporations and the National Football League have sought to export them to the rest of the world. Indeed, executives in the television and footbal…
Super Bowl Sunday: A National Holiday and a Global Curiosity
On 15 January 1967, the National Football League (NFL) and the American Football League (AFL) staged the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a contest that would soon become known in common parl
The Original Pan-American Games? The 1937 Dallas Pan-American Olympics
In 1937, Dallas, Texas, hosted a sporting festival that drew teams from across the Americas to a ‘Pan American Olympics’. Organized under the umbrella of the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition, the games drew hundreds of athletes for track and field contests, soccer football matches, and a boxing tournament. Though historians generally consider the 1951 Buenos Aires Pan-American Games as the genesis of the Western Hemisphere’s biggest spor…
Global Television and the Transformation of the Olympics: The 1984 Los Angeles Games
The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles witnessed a transformation in the economic, political and cultural dynamics of the modern Olympic movement. By the 1980s many observers worried that the Olympics tottered on the verge of extinction. Plagued by boycotts, terrorism and intractable national rivalries and beset by financial shortfalls, cost overruns and the expenditure of vast sums for 'white elephant' facilities, the list of potential suitors for hos…
The Rise of Modern Sport in Fin de Siècle São Paulo: Reading Elite and Bourgeois Sensibilities, the Popular Press, and the Creation of Cultural Capital
In the period between 1890 and 1910, British sport flourished in a rapidly modernizing Brazilian city. São Paulo boomed as a coffee export centre for the global market, growing into the second largest metropolis in Brazil. New businesses and industries developed and thousands of immigrants from around the world migrated to the expanding South American city. Along with the flow of new residents came new ideas, new attitudes, and new lifestyles. Br…
Region and Race: The Legacies of the St Louis Olympics
St Louis staged the third modern Olympics in 1904, an event most historians have labelled as a less than memorable occasion and some have contended nearly derailed the nascent Olympic movement. Consigned to a regional hamlet rather than a global city, the 1904 St Louis games were supposedly a model of how not to conduct an Olympian spectacle. Taking a different perspective, however, the St Louis games had a profound influence on how the United St…
Preface: American National Pastimes
Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark DyresonMark Dyreson is Professor of Kinesiology and Affiliate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely on the history of modern sports including Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Crafting Patriotism for Global Domination: America at the Olympic Games (Routledge, 2009).Jaime SchultzJaime S…
A Brief Taxonomy of Sports that Were Not Quite American National Pastimes: Fads and Flashes-in-the-Pan, Nationwide and Regional Pastimes, the Pastimes of Other Nations, and Pan-National Pastimes
Several sports have served as American national pastimes over the course of the nation's history. Horse racing, hunting, prize fighting, baseball, football, and basketball have waxed and waned in a long series of debates over what constitutes ‘true' national pastimes. Unlike some nations that have declared national pastimes by governmental fiat, US national games emerge from organic and sometimes chaotic cultural processes. An alternative history…
American National Pastimes: The Genealogy of an Idea
In the early twenty-first century, a variety of sports jockey for a position as an American national pastime alongside football, basketball, and baseball, the games currently ensconced as the leading threesome. In the longer course of American history, hunting, horse racing, and prizefighting have also laid claim to the national pastime title. Popular acceptance as a national pastime gives a sport tremendous economic, cultural, and social clout. …
The Emergence of Basketball as an American National Pastime: From a Popular Participant Sport to a Spectacle of Nationhood
Invented in the USA in 1891, basketball immediately proved a popular pastime among those who played the game but it did not initially rank in the estimation of most American observers as a national pastime. By the twenty-first century, however, basketball had become acclaimed by the media and fans as one of a trio of team sports that stood as national pastimes, alongside baseball and American football. Promoters of basketball have since its inven…
A Powerful False Positive: Nationalism, Science and Public Opinion in the ‘Oxygen Doping’ Allegations Against Japanese Swimmers at the 1932 Olympics
At the 1932 Olympic games the Japanese men's swim team upset their heavily favoured American hosts. Among the many explanations offered for the surprising result, some Americans charged that the Japanese team had ‘doped’ by inhaling supplemental oxygen before they raced. The Japanese admitted to the practice while they and their supporters noted that no rule existed barring such a practice. Nevertheless, allegations flew and attracted the scrutin…
Australia's Asian Sporting Context, 1920s – 30s
This book examines Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region during the interwar period. Until now, Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region have been neglected by scholars of Australian and Asian sports history, and the broader field of Australia’s Asian context. Concentrating on the period of the 1920s and 1930s – when sporting relationships between Australia and a number of Asian nations emerged in a variety of s…
Globalizing the Nation-Making Process: Modern Sport in World History
This article is part of the following collections: The International Journal of the History of Sport Best Article Prize: Early Winners (1984-2009)
Los Angeles is the Olympic City: Legacies of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games
In no other city but Los Angeles have the Olympics so completely shaped metropolitan identity – not even in modern Athens. Los Angeles used the 1932 games to put itself on the global map. The city used the 1984 games to redefine its image to the world. The Olympics helped Los Angeles to make itself the capital of the world's popular culture industry. The Los Angeles' Olympic productions have provided enduring lessons in how to use the games to ma…
Prologue: The paradoxes of American insularity, exceptionalism and imperialism
The themes of insularity, exceptionalism and imperialism have for more than a century stood at the centre of historical interpretations on the development of the United States. Frederick Jackson Tu
World Harmony or an Athletic ‘Clash of Civilizations’? The Beijing Olympic Spectacle, BMX Bicycles and the American Contours of Globalisation
In spite of rhetorical flourishes concerning world harmony, from US vantages the 2008 Beijing Olympics represented an episode in the ‘clash of civilisations’ between an American-led ‘Occident’ and China's ‘Confucian’ civilisation. The US media and public tend to see the Olympics through Samuel Huntington's combative interpretation of world affairs rather than as a pacific transnational partnership. The Chinese tendency to count medals to guarante…
Imperial 'deep play: Reading sport and visions of the five empires of the 'New World', 1919-1941
In the period between the First World War and the Second World War the US became the globe's leading power and sought to extend its cultural influence, particularly around the Pacific Rim and in Latin America. Following the lead of Great Britain, the US employed sport as a tool of empire. In the process an emerging American empire came into sporting conflicts with the remnants of older Iberian and Chinese empires, the outposts of a still signific…
American National Pastimes: The Genealogy of an Idea
In the early twenty-first century, a variety of sports jockey for a position as an American national pastime alongside football, basketball, and baseball, the games currently ensconced as the leading threesome. In the longer course of American history, hunting, horse racing, and prizefighting have also laid claim to the national pastime title. Popular acceptance as a national pastime gives a sport tremendous economic, cultural, and social clout. …
The Emergence of Basketball as an American National Pastime: From a Popular Participant Sport to a Spectacle of Nationhood
Invented in the USA in 1891, basketball immediately proved a popular pastime among those who played the game but it did not initially rank in the estimation of most American observers as a national pastime. By the twenty-first century, however, basketball had become acclaimed by the media and fans as one of a trio of team sports that stood as national pastimes, alongside baseball and American football. Promoters of basketball have since its inven…
Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology
Journal Article Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology. Ed. by Donald G. Kyle and Gary D. Stark. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. x + 154 pp. $24.50.) Get access Mark Dyreson Mark Dyreson Weber State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 3, December 1991, Page 1043, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078818 Published: 01 December 1991
Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience
The republic of consumption at the Olympic Games: Globalization, Americanization, and Californization
Action sports such as beach volleyball and snowboarding have recently become popular commodities at the Olympics. While some observers view these new sports as global phenomena with transnational origins, they were incubated in California and are linked to the promotion of American visions of affluence. The encroachment of these sports onto global stages at the Olympics signals the continuing historical power of Californization, a particular bran…
Preparing to Take Credit for China's Glory: American Perspectives on the Beijing Olympic Games
China's plan to use the 2008 Olympics to herald hopes of a coming Chinese global dominion follows a custom established by the US in the preceding century. US leaders and the public routinely hailed the twentieth century as the ‘American century’ and used the Olympics to signify their hegemony. During this period the US perceived China both as a ‘sick man’ that could be rescued by American-style sport and as a ‘sleeping giant’ that might someday a…
Global Television and the Transformation of the Olympics: The 1984 Los Angeles Games
The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles witnessed a transformation in the economic, political and cultural dynamics of the modern Olympic movement. By the 1980s many observers worried that the Olympics tottered on the verge of extinction. Plagued by boycotts, terrorism and intractable national rivalries and beset by financial shortfalls, cost overruns and the expenditure of vast sums for 'white elephant' facilities, the list of potential suitors for hos…
The Rise of Modern Sport in Fin de Siècle São Paulo: Reading Elite and Bourgeois Sensibilities, the Popular Press, and the Creation of Cultural Capital
In the period between 1890 and 1910, British sport flourished in a rapidly modernizing Brazilian city. São Paulo boomed as a coffee export centre for the global market, growing into the second largest metropolis in Brazil. New businesses and industries developed and thousands of immigrants from around the world migrated to the expanding South American city. Along with the flow of new residents came new ideas, new attitudes, and new lifestyles. Br…
Prologue – The paradoxes of imitation and resistance: The origins of the map of an American empire of sports
Reading American Readings of Beijing 2008
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics China bested the US in the gold medal count by 51 to 36 while the US topped China in the overall tally by 110 to 100. Ignoring claims from China and elsewhere that the Chinese had ‘won' the mythical Olympic ‘championship', American interpreters employed a clever calculus of the medal data to stake their claim to a convincing US triumph. The American efforts follow a long history of selective national readings of Olymp…
Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire? American Women Olympians and the Politics of Consumption
The 1920s witnessed both an explosion in sporting opportunities and the first exercise of national suffrage for women in the USA. Some commentators, including several women athletes, claimed that women's incursions into the formerly male domains of highly-competitive athletics were even more important than their hard-fought victory which won them the right to vote. Female athletes were hailed as symbols of the `new woman's' political and social l…
New Dimensions of Sport in Modern Europe: Perspectives from the ‘Long Twentieth Century’
This collection offers new perspectives on European sport history in the ‘long twentieth century’ designed to challenge and deconstruct what might be considered ‘traditional’ or more familiar Euro-centric conceptions and geographies of sport and leisure—especially those deriving from the leading hotbeds of European sport history. This special issue introduction adds to the growing corpus of explorations of sport and leisure in late-modern Europea…
Looking Backward and Forward from the 24-Million-Word Mark: A Managing Editor’s Perspective on The International Journal of the History of Sport in Transition
With the completion of volume 36, the 2019 run of The International Journal of the History of Sport, this periodical has since 1984 published more that 24-million words. To mark that occasion, the current Managing Editor looks to the past, present, and future of The International Journal of the History of Sport. After a brief sketch of the trials and tribulations in the journal’s publishing history, the Managing Editor outlines an extensive refor…
The Super Bowl as a Television Spectacle: Global Designs, Glocal Niches, and Parochial Patterns
In the contemporary US, the Super Bowl creates the largest ‘shared experience’ in the nation. More people tune into these spectacles than attend worship services, vote in elections, or celebrate traditional holidays. Super Bowls have become such powerful elements in US national culture that television corporations and the National Football League have sought to export them to the rest of the world. Indeed, executives in the television and footbal…
Super Bowl Sunday: A National Holiday and a Global Curiosity
On 15 January 1967, the National Football League (NFL) and the American Football League (AFL) staged the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a contest that would soon become known in common parl
A Powerful False Positive: Nationalism, Science and Public Opinion in the ‘Oxygen Doping’ Allegations Against Japanese Swimmers at the 1932 Olympics
At the 1932 Olympic games the Japanese men's swim team upset their heavily favoured American hosts. Among the many explanations offered for the surprising result, some Americans charged that the Japanese team had ‘doped’ by inhaling supplemental oxygen before they raced. The Japanese admitted to the practice while they and their supporters noted that no rule existed barring such a practice. Nevertheless, allegations flew and attracted the scrutin…
The Flying Finn's American Sojourn: Hannes Kolehmainen in the United States, 1912–1921
Shortly after he won three gold medals and one silver medal in distance running events at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Finland's Hannes Kolehmainen immigrated to the United States. He spent nearly a decade living in Brooklyn, plying his trade as a mason and dominating the amateur endurance running circuit in his adopted homeland. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1921 but returned to Finland shortly thereafter. During his American sojourn, th…
Prologue – Cathedrals of Sport: Mapping New Territories
(2008). Prologue – Cathedrals of Sport: Mapping New Territories. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 25, Cathedrals of Sport: The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States, pp. 1420-1426
Epilogue: Athletic Clashes of Civilizations or Bridges Over Cultural Divisions? The Olympic Games as Legacies and the Legacies of the Olympic Games
The legacies of the modern Olympics litter the landscape of the twentieth century, and have begun to crop-up in the new terrain of the twenty-first century. The Olympics gave birth to their great r
Melting‐pot victories: Racial ideas and the Olympic games in American culture during the progressive era
(1989). Melting‐pot victories: racial ideas and the Olympic games in American culture during the progressive era. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 49-61
Melting‐pot victories: Racial ideas and the Olympic games in American culture during the progressive era
(1989). Melting‐pot victories: racial ideas and the Olympic games in American culture during the progressive era. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 49-61
Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology
Journal Article Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology. Ed. by Donald G. Kyle and Gary D. Stark. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. x + 154 pp. $24.50.) Get access Mark Dyreson Mark Dyreson Weber State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 3, December 1991, Page 1043, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078818 Published: 01 December 1991
Sport and visions of the “American century”
In 1899, as the United States prepared to enter the twentieth century, the man who would in just two years become its president declared a global culture war. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that the new century could be and should be an “American century.” Roosevelt predicted that if the republic committed itself to the strenuous life it would become the world's leader. He insisted that national devotion to sports—the cornerstone of the strenuous …
Maybe It's Better to Bowl Alone: Sport, Community and Democracy in American Thought
(2001). Maybe It's Better to Bowl Alone: Sport, Community and Democracy in American Thought. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 19-30
Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience
Globalizing the Nation-Making Process: Modern Sport in World History
This article is part of the following collections: The International Journal of the History of Sport Best Article Prize: Early Winners (1984-2009)
Icons of Liberty or Objects of Desire? American Women Olympians and the Politics of Consumption
The 1920s witnessed both an explosion in sporting opportunities and the first exercise of national suffrage for women in the USA. Some commentators, including several women athletes, claimed that women's incursions into the formerly male domains of highly-competitive athletics were even more important than their hard-fought victory which won them the right to vote. Female athletes were hailed as symbols of the `new woman's' political and social l…
Aggressive America: Media nationalism and the ‘war’ over olympic pictures in sport's ‘golden age’
During the 1920s the Olympic Games became a valuable commodity in the burgeoning global sports market. Sensing an opportunity to increase revenues dramatically, theorganizing committees for the 1924 Paris Games and 1928 Amsterdam Games created exclusive monopolies to sell still and motion picture rights of Olympic events. This new arrangement radically altered the traditional relation between the media and sportspromoters. Media conglomerates in …
Prologue: The paradoxes of American insularity, exceptionalism and imperialism
The themes of insularity, exceptionalism and imperialism have for more than a century stood at the centre of historical interpretations on the development of the United States. Frederick Jackson Tu
Prologue – Cathedrals of Sport: Mapping New Territories
(2008). Prologue – Cathedrals of Sport: Mapping New Territories. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 25, Cathedrals of Sport: The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States, pp. 1420-1426
If We Build It Will They Come? The Plans for a National Stadium and American Olympic Desires
In the first half of the twentieth century, the US national capital of Washington was a small city that dreamed it might become a cosmopolitan destination and rank among the great cities of the world. Washington's boosters in the District of Columbia and in the federal government considered the construction of a national stadium that would rise alongside the other monuments proliferating along the National Mall as the cornerstone of their ambitio…
Los Angeles is the Olympic City: Legacies of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games
In no other city but Los Angeles have the Olympics so completely shaped metropolitan identity – not even in modern Athens. Los Angeles used the 1932 games to put itself on the global map. The city used the 1984 games to redefine its image to the world. The Olympics helped Los Angeles to make itself the capital of the world's popular culture industry. The Los Angeles' Olympic productions have provided enduring lessons in how to use the games to ma…
Preparing to Take Credit for China's Glory: American Perspectives on the Beijing Olympic Games
China's plan to use the 2008 Olympics to herald hopes of a coming Chinese global dominion follows a custom established by the US in the preceding century. US leaders and the public routinely hailed the twentieth century as the ‘American century’ and used the Olympics to signify their hegemony. During this period the US perceived China both as a ‘sick man’ that could be rescued by American-style sport and as a ‘sleeping giant’ that might someday a…
Epilogue: Athletic Clashes of Civilizations or Bridges Over Cultural Divisions? The Olympic Games as Legacies and the Legacies of the Olympic Games
The legacies of the modern Olympics litter the landscape of the twentieth century, and have begun to crop-up in the new terrain of the twenty-first century. The Olympics gave birth to their great r
The ‘Black Auxiliaries’ in American Memories: Sport, Race and Politics in the Construction of Modern Legacies
At the 1936 Olympics a contingent of African American track and field athletes garnered eight gold, three silver, and two bronze medals to highlight an otherwise disappointing performance by the American team. Dubbed the 'black auxiliaries' by the German press, they were led by the luminous Jesse Owens who through his four-gold medal performance built an enduring global legacy as an Olympic icon. Lost in Owens' long shadow were the other 'black a…
Epilogue: Showcases for Global Aspirations: Meditations on the Histories of Olympic Games and World's Fairs
In 1851, nearly half a century before the modern Olympic movement sprouted on the global stage, what was then the world's most powerful nation hosted the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
Reading American Readings of Beijing 2008
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics China bested the US in the gold medal count by 51 to 36 while the US topped China in the overall tally by 110 to 100. Ignoring claims from China and elsewhere that the Chinese had ‘won' the mythical Olympic ‘championship', American interpreters employed a clever calculus of the medal data to stake their claim to a convincing US triumph. The American efforts follow a long history of selective national readings of Olymp…
Constructing the Marathon Nation: US Perspectives on Korean National Identity from the 1930s to the 1950s
From the 1930s through the 1950s, Americans read Korean national identity through the prism of marathons. At the 1936 Olympics, Koreans running as conscripts for Japan won gold and bronze medals in the marathon, sparking outbreaks of Korean nationalism and creating a global image of the marathon as Korea's national sport. As Korea emerged from the Second World War divided into US and Soviet protectorates, Koreans from American-occupied South Kore…
Prologue – The paradoxes of imitation and resistance: The origins of the map of an American empire of sports
Mapping Sport History and the History of Sport in Europe
Research Article| October 01 2011 Mapping Sport History and the History of Sport in Europe Mark Dyreson Mark Dyreson Departments of Kinesiology and History, The Pennsylvania State University Correspondence to [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2011) 38 (3): 397–405. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.38.3.397 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permis…
Imperial 'deep play: Reading sport and visions of the five empires of the 'New World', 1919-1941
In the period between the First World War and the Second World War the US became the globe's leading power and sought to extend its cultural influence, particularly around the Pacific Rim and in Latin America. Following the lead of Great Britain, the US employed sport as a tool of empire. In the process an emerging American empire came into sporting conflicts with the remnants of older Iberian and Chinese empires, the outposts of a still signific…
The Flying Finn's American Sojourn: Hannes Kolehmainen in the United States, 1912–1921
Shortly after he won three gold medals and one silver medal in distance running events at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Finland's Hannes Kolehmainen immigrated to the United States. He spent nearly a decade living in Brooklyn, plying his trade as a mason and dominating the amateur endurance running circuit in his adopted homeland. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1921 but returned to Finland shortly thereafter. During his American sojourn, th…
World Harmony or an Athletic ‘Clash of Civilizations’? The Beijing Olympic Spectacle, BMX Bicycles and the American Contours of Globalisation
In spite of rhetorical flourishes concerning world harmony, from US vantages the 2008 Beijing Olympics represented an episode in the ‘clash of civilisations’ between an American-led ‘Occident’ and China's ‘Confucian’ civilisation. The US media and public tend to see the Olympics through Samuel Huntington's combative interpretation of world affairs rather than as a pacific transnational partnership. The Chinese tendency to count medals to guarante…
Australia's Asian Sporting Context, 1920s – 30s
This book examines Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region during the interwar period. Until now, Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region have been neglected by scholars of Australian and Asian sports history, and the broader field of Australia’s Asian context. Concentrating on the period of the 1920s and 1930s – when sporting relationships between Australia and a number of Asian nations emerged in a variety of s…
Olympic Legacies: Intended and Unintended
1. Prologue: Guarantees of Global Goodwill: Post-Olympic Legacies - Too Many Limping White Elephants? J. A. Mangan 2. Olympic Environmental Concerns as a Legacy of the Winter Games Jean-Loup Chappelet 3. The Albertville Winter Olympics: Unexpected Legacies - Failed Expectations for Regional Economic Development Thierry Terret 4. Maximizing Olympic Impacts by Building Up Legacies Chris Gratton and Holger Preuss 5. The Seoul Olympics: Economic Mira…
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