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Routledge Research in Sports History

About the Book Series

The Routledge Research in Sports History series features leading research in the development and historical significance of sport and physical culture. Including historiographical, regional, and thematic studies, and spanning a variety of periods, sports, and geographical areas, the series showcases ground-breaking, cross-disciplinary work from established and emerging sport historians. Aiming to be global in reach, inclusive of all voices, and reflecting a contemporary social, political, and cultural consciousness, the series represents an important contribution to the broader study of sport and society.

21 Series Titles


Cricket: A Political History of the Global Game, 1945-2017

Cricket: A Political History of the Global Game, 1945-2017

1st Edition

By Stephen Wagg
January 03, 2019

Cricket is an enduring paradox. On the one hand, it symbolises much that is outmoded: imperialism; a leisured elite; a rural, aristocratic Englishness. On the other, it endures as a global game and does so by skilful adaptation, trading partly on its mythic past and partly on its capacity to ...

Football and Literature in South America

Football and Literature in South America

1st Edition

By David Wood
July 30, 2018

South America is a region that enjoys an unusually high profile as the origin of some of the world’s greatest writers and most celebrated footballers. This is the first book to undertake a systematic study of the relationship between football and literature across South America. Beginning with the ...

Taekwondo From a Martial Art to a Martial Sport

Taekwondo: From a Martial Art to a Martial Sport

1st Edition

By Udo Moenig
November 22, 2016

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the historical, political, and technical evolution of taekwondo. Many of the supposedly ‘traditional’ and ‘ancient’ Korean cultural elements attached to taekwondo are, in fact, remnants of East Asia’s modernization drive, and largely inherited from the...

Association Football A Study in Figurational Sociology

Association Football: A Study in Figurational Sociology

1st Edition

By Graham Curry, Eric Dunning
November 07, 2016

This book presents a synthesis of the work on early football undertaken by the authors over the past two decades. It explores aspects of a figurational approach to sociology to examine the early development of football rules in the middle part of the nineteenth century. The book tests Dunning’s ...

A Contemporary History of Women's Sport, Part One Sporting Women, 1850-1960

A Contemporary History of Women's Sport, Part One: Sporting Women, 1850-1960

1st Edition

By Jean Williams
May 31, 2016

This book is an historical survey of women’s sport from 1850-1960. It looks at some of the more recent methodological approaches to writing sports history and raises questions about how the history of women’s sport has so far been shaped by academic writers. Questions explored in this ...

A Social History of Tennis in Britain

A Social History of Tennis in Britain

1st Edition

By Robert Lake
May 26, 2016

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2015- from the British Society for Sports History. From its advent in the mid-late nineteenth century as a garden-party pastime to its development into a highly commercialised and professionalised high-performance sport, the history of tennis in Britain ...

Making Sport History Disciplines, identities and the historiography of sport

Making Sport History: Disciplines, identities and the historiography of sport

1st Edition

Edited By Pascal Delheye
October 12, 2015

The field of sport history is a relatively new research domain, situated at the intersection of a number of disciplines and sub-disciplines.  This interdisciplinarity has created interesting avenues for growth and fresh thinking but also inherent problems of coherence and identity.   Making Sport ...

Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s

Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s

1st Edition

By Susan Grant
June 02, 2014

From its very inception the Soviet state valued the merits and benefits of physical culture, which included not only sport but also health, hygiene, education, labour and defence. Physical culture propaganda was directed at the Soviet population, and even more particularly at young people, women ...

Representing the Sporting Past in Museums and Halls of Fame

Representing the Sporting Past in Museums and Halls of Fame

1st Edition

Edited By Murray G. Phillips
September 20, 2013

We live in a "museum age," and sport museums are part of this phenomenon. In this book, leading international sport history scholars examine sport museums including renowned institutions like the Olympic Museum in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, the ...

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