Mike Huggins
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3991002 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Mike Huggins |
| PRENOMES | Mike |
| SOBRENOME | Huggins |
| ASSINATURA | HUGGINS M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Cumbria |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2789-4756 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 69 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 97 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 67 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1986 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Animal-Human Relations
For much of the sporting past, animal-human relationships have been central to many of England’s more popular sports, often encouraging sociability, gambling, and commercialisation. Yet historians of sport are yet to fully initiate studies of animal-human inter-relationships. Cockfighting provides just one example. It was a leading sport in England from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. For its more professionalised and commerciali…
James Anthony (Tony) Mangan (1939-2025)
James Anthony (Tony) Mangan, founding editor of this journal, died suddenly on the 8th December 2025, aged 86. Mangan was a pioneering figure who exerted a lasting and far-reaching impact on sport ...
Female Football Spectators in Britain 1863–1939
Mike Huggins, Emeritus Professor at the University of Cumbria, reviews the book: 'Female Football Spectators in Britain 1863–1939: A Historical Analysis', by Robert Lewis (New York: Routledge, 2023). Robert Lewis’s original and fascinating study of early female football spectators needs to be set in its context. Soccer, now the most important global spectator sport, reaching perhaps four billion fans, began in Britain. In 1874, fewer than fifty c…
The Rise and Fall of Westmorland’s ‘County’ Racecourse
Although many towns had race meetings in the past, most survived only a short time. It has been rare that the reasons why so many failed have been explored. Most simply stopped without any local newspaper explanation. This microstudy of a small local northern race meeting is very suggestive about just how complex and precarious the survival of any meeting could be, and aims to encourage further research. Kendal, the largest town in Westmorland, h…
From Popularity to Suppression
The reasons for cockfighting's relatively successful legal suppression by Act of Parliament in 1835 were complex, subtle and nuanced. This study begins by placing cockfighting's social and cultural functioning across the period from c. 1750 to 1835 in far clearer historical context, stressing the centrality of wagering. During this period, cocking had a key place in the cultural wars that increasingly focused on so called ‘blood sports' and anima…
Umpires, Referees, Judges and Stewards
This paper explores the way arbitration approaches developed through the first four stages of rule development, focusing in turn on the ways the popularity of wagering first created more need for formally signed ‘articles of agreement’ for each match, and then the inclusion of arbitration and judgement methods in the emerging early forms of rules. It then shows the way various official roles evolved over time alongside broader rule developments: …
Principles, Pragmatism, and Pressure
By the early twentieth century north-east England had become one of the heartlands of soccer, and its regional rugby union clubs were losing support. But from 1895 to 1914, following the emergence of a new rugby organisation, ‘Northern Union’ (later known as ‘rugby league’) in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Cumbria, rugby union clubs in Durham and Northumberland faced further difficulties. This paper explores the range of challenges they fac…
Forms of competition in proto-modern eighteenth-century English sport
Scholarship on sporting competition during the eighteenth century has been lacking, and its socio-cultural context is not yet widely understood. This paper moves consideration of sporting competition back to this important period of sporting ‘proto-modernity’. It begins by setting it clearly in its cultural context, showing how while eighteenth-century English sporting culture gained increased elements of commonality, it was always differentiated…
Urbs in rure
This article brings together three aspects of early modern urban life: the later stages of the urban renaissance, the consumer revolution and horse racing. Those towns identified as having an effectively commercialized ‘race week’ between 1750 and 1805 challenge notions of any trickle-down effect from London. Successful organization and funding came largely from co-operation rather than division between the county aristocracy and gentry and the u…
The Beginning of Boxing in Britain, 1300–1700
Books about boxing, a form of competition based on blows with the fist, have been published regularly over the past two hundred years. The British Library, for example, currently lists over 1,400 works held there, including solid academic works by writers such as Kasia Boddy, Dennis Brailsford, Elliott Gorn, and Jeffrey Sammons. Boxing aficionados also have the International Boxing Research Organization, founded in 1982 with the hope of establish…
Match-Fixing and Sport
Associativity, Gambling, and the Rise of Protomodern British Sport, 1660–1800
This paper argues that Stefan Szymanski’s theory that formal associativity in terms of British clubs and societies during the eighteenth century was the key factor in the spread of sport has been overstated. It was wagering, most especially the high-stakes “wagers” between wealthy individuals on sporting contests, stemming from notions of politeness, civility, and honor that generated media coverage, wider spectator interest, a larger betting mar…
Cultural Transfer, Circulation, and Diffusion between Britain and Europe from the 1770s to the 1870s
This study explores the transnational flows of ideas about racing, thoroughbred horse-breeding, and racing’s literary structures between Britain and mainland Europe between circa 1770 and the 1880s. It draws out the ideas and ideologies associated with horse racing and breeding; the cross-border movements of cultural mediators (such as owners, breeders, jockeys, and trainers); and the relevant media produced. It reveals the initial resistance to …
A New History of Yachting; Skiing Into Modernity
Many years ago, a majority of histories of sport were simplistically dismissed by mainstream academics as written by ‘fans with typewriters’. From the 1980s however, historians of sport increasingly became a small but distinctive feature of university history and sports studies departments, though their work was largely rooted in social history and theory. From about the same time, this subfield began to develop its own specialist journals, socie…
Match-Fixing
Match-fixing has a long history, but while use of drugs in sport has a substantial secondary literature, match-fixing has only recently begun to attract the attention of historians. This essay begins with a brief overview of its global contemporary contexts, the broad range of sports where it now surfaces, increased recognition of its moral, social, and economic threat, and the varied responses of leading sports organizations, legal gambling oper…
Aintree
John Pinfold, a scholar who worked at the L.S.E. and Rhodes House in Oxford until his retirement, has long been recognised as the leading expert on the famous Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree, a course once in the country near Liverpool, and now surrounded by Liverpool’s urban sprawl. Each of his books and articles has provided new insights, but Aintree is the best yet, an outstandingly erudite and scholarly, well-referenced but also very r…
Exploring the Backstage of Victorian Respectability
This paper shares Andersson’s interest in exploring the ‘backstage’ of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made us…
British Sporting Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century
In recent years the vast majority of historians of sport have shown relatively little interest in the long eighteenth century, preferring to concentrate on the more recent past, and largely abandoning the field to specialists in literature such as John Whale or David Nash, or mainstream historians like Wolfgang Behringer Emma Griffin, Rebekka Mallinckrodt, or Angela Schattner. They have shed new light on a period which has been tentatively sugges…
The Heath and the Horse
A book on Newmarket Heath and its racing might seem at first sight merely another example of the local history of sport, but this is far more than a local history. Newmarket's various racecourses across the Heath and associated buildings have been key sites in terms of the history of British horseracing since the 1660s, albeit slightly less popular around 1740 and again in a brief collapse in its fortunes from the 1830s up to the 1850s. So this c…
The Visual in Sport History
Historians of sport now increasingly accept that visual inquiry offers another dimension to social and cultural research into sport and its history. It is complex and its boundaries are rapidly evolving. This overview offers a justification for placing more emphasis on visual approaches and an introduction to the study and interpretation of visual culture in relation to the history of sport. It stresses the importance of adopting a critical appro…
Sports Gambling during the Second World War
The catastrophe of the Second World War had a significant effect on British social and economic life, with less leisure and more time and energy spent on the war effort, yet sports betting survived. The paper begins by examining the arguments strongly advanced by vociferous anti-betting groups in the first years after the outbreak of war, and assesses their limited success. Assessments of betting turnover suggest an initial decline in betting, la…
Racing Culture, Betting, and Sporting Protomodernity
This paper offers a microstudy, deconstructing the meaning and significance of a famous carriage (or chaise) match at Newmarket in 1750 and a contemporary painting of the event. It uses these as a starting point to explore its relationship to debates about the early modern period and modernity. It analyzes the details of the carriage match, exploring its visual and print representations and its cultural context. It further argues that, for many s…
A Social History of Tennis in Britain
Only Gold Matters
Mike Huggins reviews the book 'Only gold matters: Cecil Griffiths, the exiled Olympic champion' (John Hanna, Chequered Flag Publishing, 2014, ISBN 9780956946058)
Ashbrooke Whit Sports, Sunderland and Its Records
Ordinary sports clubs and their annual sports have been largely ignored by historians of sport, whose focus has been largely on more mega-events and on larger clubs, and on the twentieth century rather than earlier periods. This paper provides a rare case study of a local athletic sports meeting, in late Victorian and early Edwardian north-east England, using club records, newspaper, census and other record-linkage material, and setting it in its…
Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Review Essay)
Prologue
This paper highlights the value of images and materiality associated with sport in the past, and explores the range of sociocultural practices associated with them. It provides a critique of the neglect of such sources by many historians and notes that interest is now substantially growing in visuality and visual material. It emphasises the huge breadth and depth of sports-related evidence that can now be accessed, from stamps to stadiums and fro…
The Visual in Sport History
Historians of sport now increasingly accept that visual inquiry offers another dimension to social and cultural research into sport and its history. It is complex and its boundaries are rapidly evolving. This overview offers a justification for placing more emphasis on visual approaches and an introduction to the study and interpretation of visual culture in relation to the history of sport. It stresses the importance of adopting a critical appro…
Projecting the visual
Between the wars soccer was the leading national sport in Britain. But far more watched the brief depictions of ‘celluloid’ soccer on the newsreels in the cinema than ever watched football on the pitch. Newsreels were a central cultural feature, yet their broader social, historical and ideological significance has been overlooked by both sports and media historians. This study draws on an extensive body of surviving newsreel material. It begins b…
Match-Fixing
Match-fixing has a long history, but while use of drugs in sport has a substantial secondary literature, match-fixing has only recently begun to attract the attention of historians. This essay begins with a brief overview of its global contemporary contexts, the broad range of sports where it now surfaces, increased recognition of its moral, social, and economic threat, and the varied responses of leading sports organizations, legal gambling oper…
Working-class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840-1970
In Britain, with its voluntarist traditions, the state played a relatively reluctant role in the development of holiday time provision up to and beyond the second World War. Factors such as wages, free time, the availability of transport and accommodation all helped to shape workers' holiday experiences. Such themes, as with shared holiday leisure activities or studies of the growth of resorts themselves, are already well treated in leading examp…
Second‐class citizens? english middle‐class culture and sport, 1850–1910
The spread of association football in north‐east England, 1876–90
(1989). The spread of association football in north‐east England, 1876–90: the pattern of diffusion. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 299-318
Gone but not forgotten
Following the death of a sportsperson, his or her tombstone sometimes became a highly significant material form, publicly summarising and commemorating past sporting life. This necro-cultural study explores the way in which such tombstones expressed sporting meaning. It emphasises the importance of context, and uses iconology and iconography to deconstruct the tombstones’ images and their interactions with accompanying inscriptions. It examines t…
More Sinful Pleasures? Leisure, Respectability and the Male Middle Classes in Victorian England
'Respectability' had great ideological power in Victorian society. But current analyses of middle-class leisure are seriously flawed in over-marginalising less respectable behavior. The paper begins by examining 'respectability' and the non-work contexts where pressures for compliance were strongest, such as the home and the church. It then explores a range of leisure contexts where pressures were far weaker, and where more sinful pleasures such …
Culture, class and respectability
(1994). Culture, class and respectability: racing and the english middle classes in the nineteenth century. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 19-41
Urbs in rure
This article brings together three aspects of early modern urban life: the later stages of the urban renaissance, the consumer revolution and horse racing. Those towns identified as having an effectively commercialized ‘race week’ between 1750 and 1805 challenge notions of any trickle-down effect from London. Successful organization and funding came largely from co-operation rather than division between the county aristocracy and gentry and the u…
Associativity, Gambling, and the Rise of Protomodern British Sport, 1660–1800
This paper argues that Stefan Szymanski’s theory that formal associativity in terms of British clubs and societies during the eighteenth century was the key factor in the spread of sport has been overstated. It was wagering, most especially the high-stakes “wagers” between wealthy individuals on sporting contests, stemming from notions of politeness, civility, and honor that generated media coverage, wider spectator interest, a larger betting mar…
Popular Culture and Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth-Century England
This study sets out to extend and challenge existing historiography on late eighteenth century British popular culture, customary sports, class and cultural identity, focusing upon the rural geo-political borderland of England. It suggests that prevailing class-based and more London-biased studies need to be balanced with more regionalist-based work, and shows the importance of northern regional leisure variants. The textual and historical analys…
BBC Radio and Sport 1922–39
The BBC, the sole national broadcaster, was slow in entering the world of sport, but between the wars it helped reshape the way sport was experienced by the British, first presenting ‘national’ sports events such as the Derby or FA Cup final to a national audience, and later moving to much broader ‘representative’ coverage. The BBC experienced problematic beginnings to sports broadcasting in the mid-1920s, and the earlier attempts to establish ap…
Sport and the English Seaside Resort, 1800–1914
Exploring the Backstage of Victorian Respectability
This paper shares Andersson’s interest in exploring the ‘backstage’ of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made us…
Sports Gambling during the Second World War
The catastrophe of the Second World War had a significant effect on British social and economic life, with less leisure and more time and energy spent on the war effort, yet sports betting survived. The paper begins by examining the arguments strongly advanced by vociferous anti-betting groups in the first years after the outbreak of war, and assesses their limited success. Assessments of betting turnover suggest an initial decline in betting, la…
Racing Culture, Betting, and Sporting Protomodernity
This paper offers a microstudy, deconstructing the meaning and significance of a famous carriage (or chaise) match at Newmarket in 1750 and a contemporary painting of the event. It uses these as a starting point to explore its relationship to debates about the early modern period and modernity. It analyzes the details of the carriage match, exploring its visual and print representations and its cultural context. It further argues that, for many s…
Immortals of British Sport
Mike Huggins, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Immortals of British sport: a celebration of Britain's sporting history through sculpture' (Ian Hewitt and Sampson Lloyd, Vision Sports Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781909534186)
Sport, tourism and history
Until comparatively recently historians of tourism have largely paid little attention to sport, despite its historically important role as a major tourist attraction. The essay begins with a brief account of recent scholarship exploring the relationship between sport and tourism, and provides a heavily condensed chronological overview of sports tourism in the past. A more major section analyses the increasing thematic historiographical coverage r…
Art, Horse Racing and the ‘Sporting’ Gaze in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
This paper draws on social and art history, cultural studies and ‘gaze theory’ to explore how William Powell Frith's painting of Derby Day, and the various responses to it, shed light on the Epsom Derby horse race and the ways in which its multiple meanings as a mega-event were produced and exchanged in Victorian society. It continues the recent trend of using a wider range of visual methodologies to explore the history of sport. It begins by set…
Racing, Betting, Anti-Semitism and English Jewry 1800–1939
Historiography has largely focused on more respectable Anglo-Jewish leisure life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this study uses the national and regional press, contemporary novels, books and magazines to explore non-Jewish representations of Jewish sports betting and related gambling involvement, and the extent to which such representations involved anti-Semitic attitudes. In part Jewish betting and gambling simply attracte…
Sport and the British Upper Classes c .1500–2000
This article explores the main continuities and changes in upper-class sport, some foci of current research and gaps in current knowledge. It provides an overview of work carried out on individual sports such as hunting and shooting, and examines the upper-class contribution to sports patronage and rule codification in Britain, as well as the class's involvement in sport on a global scale. Upper-class sport has had a substantial impact on the rur…
And Now, Something for the Ladies
Between the wars the British went to the cinema more than any other European country. By 1939 an estimated 20 million attended each week. Approximately 60 per cent of the audience was female, and the weekly newsreels were a regular part of their experience. Although sporting coverage was largely of male sport, the various companies, from French‐owned Gaumont to American‐owned Universal and Paramount, all covered women’s sports too, telling us muc…
Mingled pleasure and speculation’
The spread of association football in north‐east England, 1876–90
(1989). The spread of association football in north‐east England, 1876–90: the pattern of diffusion. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 299-318
Culture, class and respectability
(1994). Culture, class and respectability: racing and the english middle classes in the nineteenth century. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 19-41
Nineteenth-Century Racehorse Stables in their Rural Setting
Scattered across the face of rural Britain at any one time during the nineteenth century were up to 200 training stables for thoroughbred racehorses. These provided the underpinning for the popular sport of horseracing and were also both a significant source of rural employment and a contribution to rural culture. Despite a growing recognition by rural historians that rural communities are composed of interlocking parts and linked social structur…
Lord Bentinck, the jockey club and racing morality in mid‐nineteenth century England
Sport and the English Seaside Resort, 1800–1914
Sport, social tone and the seaside resorts of Great Britain, c.1850–1914
Sport, music‐hall culture and popular song in nineteenth‐century England
(1999). Sport, music‐hall culture and popular song in nineteenth‐century England. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 82-102
Second‐class citizens? english middle‐class culture and sport, 1850–1910
More Sinful Pleasures? Leisure, Respectability and the Male Middle Classes in Victorian England
'Respectability' had great ideological power in Victorian society. But current analyses of middle-class leisure are seriously flawed in over-marginalising less respectable behavior. The paper begins by examining 'respectability' and the non-work contexts where pressures for compliance were strongest, such as the home and the church. It then explores a range of leisure contexts where pressures were far weaker, and where more sinful pleasures such …
The Media, Regional Culture and the Great North Run
Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Review Essay)
The Railways and Sport in Victorian Britain
The contribution of railways to the spread of sport in Victorian Britain has often been overemphasized by railway history, which has also concentrated too much on London. This article argues that railways affected mass spectatorship of most sport only to a limited extent in the Victorian era. Most evidence suggests that in terms of attendance at the majority of popular sporting events, the railways simply facilitated existing trends. In a minorit…
Direct and indirect influence
(2003). Direct and indirect influence: J.A. Mangan and the victorian middle classes: Major revisionist in the history of sport. The International Journal of the History of Sport: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 26-44
Sport and the English, 1918-1939
A thorough, innovative yet entertaining and readable analysis of sport as an expression of the values and social relations of a nation. Covering the years between the two World Wars, the central place of sport in English life is brought into sharp focus, providing insight into issues of gender, class, religion and locality, ideas of morality, continuity and change, and what it meant to be English during this pivotal time. Themes include: the natu…
Projecting the visual
Between the wars soccer was the leading national sport in Britain. But far more watched the brief depictions of ‘celluloid’ soccer on the newsreels in the cinema than ever watched football on the pitch. Newsreels were a central cultural feature, yet their broader social, historical and ideological significance has been overlooked by both sports and media historians. This study draws on an extensive body of surviving newsreel material. It begins b…
Working-class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840-1970
In Britain, with its voluntarist traditions, the state played a relatively reluctant role in the development of holiday time provision up to and beyond the second World War. Factors such as wages, free time, the availability of transport and accommodation all helped to shape workers' holiday experiences. Such themes, as with shared holiday leisure activities or studies of the growth of resorts themselves, are already well treated in leading examp…
BBC Radio and Sport 1922–39
The BBC, the sole national broadcaster, was slow in entering the world of sport, but between the wars it helped reshape the way sport was experienced by the British, first presenting ‘national’ sports events such as the Derby or FA Cup final to a national audience, and later moving to much broader ‘representative’ coverage. The BBC experienced problematic beginnings to sports broadcasting in the mid-1920s, and the earlier attempts to establish ap…
Betting, Sport and the British, 1918-1939
The paper argues that over the interwar period attitudes to betting were in the process of slow but steady change. Broader changes in attitudes to leisure, including increasing secularization, led to an increasingly widespread acceptance of moderate betting across all classes. Between 1920 and 1938 estimated legal gambling expenditure as a proportion of total British consumer spending rose from 1.3 per cent to 5 per cent of a much higher total co…
And Now, Something for the Ladies
Between the wars the British went to the cinema more than any other European country. By 1939 an estimated 20 million attended each week. Approximately 60 per cent of the audience was female, and the weekly newsreels were a regular part of their experience. Although sporting coverage was largely of male sport, the various companies, from French‐owned Gaumont to American‐owned Universal and Paramount, all covered women’s sports too, telling us muc…
Preface
Let me begin, briefly, in self‐reflective mode. Soccer’s Missing Men: Schoolteachers and the Spread of Association Football merges three of my personal passions: sports history, football and primar...
Sport and the British Upper Classes c .1500–2000
This article explores the main continuities and changes in upper-class sport, some foci of current research and gaps in current knowledge. It provides an overview of work carried out on individual sports such as hunting and shooting, and examines the upper-class contribution to sports patronage and rule codification in Britain, as well as the class's involvement in sport on a global scale. Upper-class sport has had a substantial impact on the rur…
Sport and the Upper Classes
This collection addresses two key questions. What was the place of sport in British upper-class life? How far have the upper classes contributed to sport in British society more generally? To begin to address such questions is important, not least because in a century far less conducive to aristocratic life, the sporting lives of the monarchy, aristocracy, gentry and other upper-class groups have been unappreciated and largely neglected. So we ne…
The Proto-globalisation of Horseracing 1730–1900
This study explores racing's global interconnectedness through an analysis of the ways in which English racing was represented, exploited and engaged by the American horseracing and thoroughbred breeding groups from c.1730 to 1900. It examines the American importation of British bloodstock; the formation of jockey clubs and rules and regulations of racing on the English model; the emigration to America of English jockeys and grooms; visits of Eng…
Horseracing and the British 1919–39
H orseracing has a powerful claim to be Britain's leading interwar sport. Cricket had its adherents; indeed, Jack Williams, the historian of interwar cricket, shows that its supporters presented it as the English 'national game'. 1 But British racegoers claimed that racing was 'our real national sport'. 2 On the basis of active participation, cricket was certainly superior with somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 playing each week in the early …
Sports, Gender, and Society (48 obras) · History (46 obras) · Sociology (45 obras) · Political science (43 obras) · History (42 obras) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (41 obras) · Law (38 obras) · Law (33 obras) · Art (31 obras) · Politics (18 obras)