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.
The Early Development of Football: Contemporary Debates
1st Edition
Edited
By Graham Curry
March 31, 2021
This fascinating collection brings together leading football historians and sociologists from the UK, Germany, the USA and Australia to offer fresh perspectives on the early development of football (soccer), not only illuminating our understanding of the early history of the world’s most popular ...
Sports Media History: Culture, Technology, Identity
1st Edition
Edited
By John Carvalho
November 06, 2020
This research collection explores the ongoing interaction between sports, media, and society throughout important periods in history, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It examines both historical moments and broader trends in sports, with an emphasis on the media’s role. ...
A History of Chinese Martial Arts
1st Edition
Edited
By Fuhua Huang, Fan Hong
June 30, 2020
Chinese martial arts have a long, meaningful history and deep cultural roots. They blend the physical components of combat with strategy, philosophy and tradition, distinguishing them from Western sports. A History of Chinese Martial Arts is the most authoritative study ever written on this topic,...
The Black Press and Black Baseball, 1915-1955: A Devil’s Bargain
1st Edition
By Brian Carroll
June 30, 2020
This book brings into dramatic relief the dilemma, or devil's bargain, that faced the black press in first building up black baseball, then crusading for the sport's integration and, as a result of that largely successful campaign, ultimately encouraging and even ensuring the demise of those same ...
Wrestling in Britain: Sporting Entertainments, Celebrity and Audiences
1st Edition
By Benjamin Litherland
December 05, 2019
At the intersection of sport, entertainment and performance, wrestling occupies a unique position in British popular culture. This is the first book to offer a detailed historical and cultural analysis of British professional wrestling, exploring the shifting popularity of the sport as well as its ...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 ...