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"Sports Social aspects United States History 20th century."
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1968 : a pivotal moment in American sports
\"Opening with Vince Lombardi's last win as coach of the Packers in Super Bowl II and closing with Joe Namath's Super Bowl III guarantee, James Nicholson delivers an original portrait of a sensational closing decade in American culture. Controversies on the field and in the ring reflected broader political and social turmoil in the late-sixties United States. With one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history, the ongoing civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War all storming in the background, Nicholson charts a course through the oddly unsettled waters of American sports in 1968: the Masters golf tournament decided by the strict enforcement of an arcane rule to the detriment of a foreign player; the winner of the Kentucky Derby disqualified for a drug violation; Muhammad Ali waiting in sports exile while he appealed a criminal conviction for draft evasion; an unorthodox rendition of the national anthem at the World Series nearly overshadowing the game it preceded; and the silent gesture at the Mexico City Olympics made by Tommie Smith and John Carlos that shocked the nation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Cold War Games
It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in
irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a
vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the
United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological
warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance.
Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C.
Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to
promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early
phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though
constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded
detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly
funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries
from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States utilized
Olympic host cities as launching pads for hyping the American
economic and political system. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the
government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International
Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent
propaganda materials around the globe as the United States
mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight
the communist threat.
Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games
recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.
eBook
Baseball Rebels
In Baseball Rebels Peter Dreier and Robert Elias examine
the key social challenges-racism, sexism and homophobia-that shaped
society and worked their way into baseball's culture, economics,
and politics. Since baseball emerged in the mid-1800s to become
America's pastime, the nation's battles over race, gender, and
sexuality have been reflected on the playing field, in the
executive suites, in the press box, and in the community. Some of
baseball's rebels are widely recognized, but most of them are
either little known or known primarily for their baseball
achievements-not their political views and activism. Everyone knows
the story of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color line, but
less known is Sam Nahem, who opposed the racial divide in the U.S.
military and organized an integrated military team that won a
championship in 1945. Or Toni Stone, the first of three women who
played for the Indianapolis Clowns in the previously all-male Negro
Leagues. Or Dave Pallone, MLB's first gay umpire. Many players,
owners, reporters, and other activists challenged both the baseball
establishment and society's status quo. Baseball Rebels
tells stories of baseball's reformers and radicals who were
influenced by, and in turn influenced, America's broader political
and social protest movements, making the game-and society-better
along the way.
eBook
Cold war games : propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. foreign policy
\"The U.S. Government became increasingly alarmed by Soviet attempts to exploit the Olympic Movement in the early 1950s, and responded to this challenge aggressively. Cold War Game chronicles that response and shows that it was not a replication of the state-directed Soviet sports system, but was instigated through covert psychological warfare operations and overt propaganda distributed to the \"free world.\" In the lead up to and during each Olympic festival throughout this period, the U.S. sent waves of propaganda material across the globe to advocate the American way of life and to denounce communism. It used the Olympic host cities as venues to advertise the American economic and political system; it also attempted to manipulate the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in clandestine ways. Cold War Games describes the emergence of government fears about communist sport in the late 1940s and, crucially, how these fears were channeled into the Olympic Games starting in 1950. It concludes its analysis in 1960 at the end point, in many ways, of covert government initiatives at Olympic festivals. Cold War Games situates sport in the larger discussion of how America was committed to a \"total\" Cold War by demonstrating that the Olympics Games was embroiled in the U.S. government's own cultural offensive\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
No Game for Boys to Play
From the untimely deaths of young athletes to chronic disease among retired players, roiling debates over tackle football have profound implications for more than one million American boys-some as young as five years old-who play the sport every year. In this book, Kathleen Bachynski offers the first history of youth tackle football and debates over its safety. In the postwar United States, high school football was celebrated as a \"moral\" sport for young boys, one that promised and celebrated the creation of the honorable male citizen. Even so, Bachynski shows that throughout the twentieth century, coaches, sports equipment manufacturers, and even doctors were more concerned with \"saving the game\" than young boys' safety-even though injuries ranged from concussions and broken bones to paralysis and death. By exploring sport, masculinity, and citizenship, Bachynski uncovers the cultural priorities other than child health that made a collision sport the most popular high school game for American boys. These deep-rooted beliefs continue to shape the safety debate and the possible future of youth tackle football.
eBook
Black ball : Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the generation that saved the soul of the NBA
\"Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and increasingly strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. The press and the public blamed young Black players for the chaos in the NBA, citing drugs, violence, greed, and criminality. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of integration in America: the rules of the game had changed, allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything. But Black Ball argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the NBA as the star-laden powerhouse we know today, thanks largely to the efforts of Black players in challenging the white basketball establishment of owners, coaches, and spectators. Spotlighting legendary players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bernard King, and Connie Hawkins, scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball's \"Dark Ages,\" weaving together her deep knowledge of the game's key icons and institutions with incisive social and political analysis of the era. Black ballers created an aerial, improvisational, and creative style derived from the playground courts of their neighborhoods, laying the foundation for the explosive popularity and profitability of the league in subsequent decades. They also transformed labor in the pro-basketball world, filing lawsuits and organizing unions to demand better salaries and greater autonomy. Without their skills, style, and savvy, there would be no Michael Jordan, Allen Iverson, or LeBron James today\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Discipline and Indulgence
The early Cold War (1947-1964) was a time of optimism in America. Flushed with confidence by the Second World War, many heralded the American Century and saw postwar affluence as proof that capitalism would solve want and poverty. Yet this period also filled people with anxiety. Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, the consumerism and affluence of capitalism's success were seen as turning the sons of pioneers into couch potatoes.InDiscipline and Indulgence, Jeffrey Montez de Oca demonstrates how popular culture, especially college football, addressed capitalism's contradictions by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. In the dawning television age, college football provided a ritual and spectacle of the American way of life that anyone could participate in from the comfort of his own home. College football formed an ethical space of patriotic pageantry where men could produce themselves as citizens of the Cold War state. Based on a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Cold War media,Discipline and Indulgenceassesses the period's institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media, and militarism and finds the connections of contemporary sport media to today's War on Terror.
eBook
Playing from the rough : a personal journey through America's 100 greatest golf courses
\"The story of one man's quest to become the first person to play each of America's 100 greatest golf courses in a single year, an odyssey that brings him face to face with the gulf between his impoverished childhood in the Jim Crow South and the successful executive he became\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Negotiating Paradise
Accounts of U.S. empire building in Latin America typically portray politically and economically powerful North Americans descending on their southerly neighbors to engage in lopsided negotiations. Dennis Merrill's comparative history of U.S. tourism in Latin America in the twentieth century demonstrates that empire is a more textured, variable, and interactive system of inequality and resistance than commonly assumed. In his examination of interwar Mexico, early Cold War Cuba, and Puerto Rico during the Alliance for Progress, Merrill demonstrates how tourists and the international travel industry facilitated the expansion of U.S. consumer and cultural power in Latin America. He also shows the many ways in which local service workers, labor unions, business interests, and host governments vied to manage the Yankee invasion. While national leaders negotiated treaties and military occupations, visitors and hosts navigated interracial encounters in bars and brothels, confronted clashing notions of gender and sexuality at beachside resorts, and negotiated national identities. Highlighting the everyday realities of U.S. empire in ways often overlooked, Merrill's analysis provides historical context for understanding the contemporary debate over the costs and benefits of globalization.
eBook