8 must reads in sport history [reading list]

Human civilization has always celebrated movement. Whether as recreation in everyday life, or elite competition to honour the gods of Olympus, sport has been a cornerstone of human culture for both spectator and competitor since records began. From the cricket crease to the athletics track to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, discover the history of sport in 8 books and bibliographies from Oxford University Press.

1. The Oxford Handbook of Sports History

Orwell was wrong. Sports are not “war without the shooting,” nor are they “war by other means.” Although sports have generated animosity throughout human history, they also require rules. Those rules limit violence, even death. Thus, sport has been a significant part of a historical “civilizing process.” As the historical profession has taken its cultural turn over the past few decades, scholars have turned their attention to a subject once seen as marginal.

Read more in The Oxford Handbook of Sports History edited by Robert Edelman and Wayne Wilson.

2. Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire

Cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the English, it has famously been said. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became a nation.

Conceived by an unlikely coalition of imperial and local elites, it took twelve years and four failed attempts before the first Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain. Drawing on an unparalleled range of original archival sources, Cricket Country is the story of this first ‘All India’ national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland. It is also simultaneously the extraordinary tale of how the idea of India took shape on the cricket pitch long before the country gained its political independence.

Learn more about the first Indian cricket team the Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire by Prashant Kidambi

3. Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson

From playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson was the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. This book narrates the public career and private struggles of this fascinating athlete.

Learn more about the life of Althea Gibson in Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson by Ashley Brown.

4. Classical Sport

Sport was a key fixture in the classical world, from the Bronze Age to late antiquity. In the Homeric epics, competition in a number of events (including running, discus, jumping, and chariot racing) is presented primarily as an elite activity that is integrated into the Homeric aristocratic ethos of masculine valour and peer interaction. Archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence unequivocally suggests the rapid growth and popularity of competitive sport in the centuries that followed, demonstrated by the ancient Olympic games in 776 B.C. for example. Containing research on athletics, boxing, chariot racing, and gladiatorial games, learn more about ancient sport in the Oxford Bibliography of Classics.

Read Classical Sport on Oxford Bibliographies Online.

5.  Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity

Body by Weimar argues that male and female athletes fundamentally recast gender roles during Germany’s turbulent post‐World War I years and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. Athletes in the 1920s took the same techniques that were streamlining factories and offices and applied them to maximizing the efficiency of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity—quite literally—in all of its competitive, time‐oriented excess and thereby helped to popularize, and even to naturalize, the sometimes threatening process of economic rationalization by linking it to their own personal success stories. Enthroned by the media as the new cultural icons, athletes radiated sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self‐determination.

Read Body by Weimar by Eric Jensen on Oxford Academic

6. An English Tradition? The History and Significance of Fair Play

For hundreds of years, English people have claimed that fair play is at the core of their national identity. Jonathan Duke-Evans explores the origins of the idea of fair play, tracing it back to the classical world and the Dark Ages, and finding its genesis deep within England’s social structure. Charting its early development through both the tales of chivalry and the stories of popular legend, the book shows how fair play manifested itself in literature, the law, the Christian religion, and the family.

Learn more about the history of fair play in An English Tradition by Jonathan Duke-Evans

7. Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man

To a handful of colleagues, Walter Camp was a clock company executive. To nearly everyone else, he was the quintessential gentleman athlete and the Father of American Football. Born in Connecticut in 1859, he attended Yale University just as collegiate sport was becoming organized and competitive in the United States. In college, he was a varsity letterman who led the earliest efforts to codify the rules of football and to make it distinct from English rugby. As the creator of the All-America football team and the writer of some of the first football fiction, guides, and sports page coverages, Camp popularized the game like no other.

Learn more about Walter Camp’s life in Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man by Julie Des Jardins

8. Medieval Sport and Games

Some sports in the Middle Ages, such as tournaments and hunting, were monopolized by the nobility and gentry and acted as marks of status. However, archery and ball games were common throughout society, and common people encroached on hunting through poaching. The most physical sports tended to be dominated by men, but some women used bows; both genders socially joined in music and dancing.  

Discover a comprehensive list of research into medieval sport in The Oxford Bibliography of Medieval Studies.

_{Featured image Jakub Matyas via Unsplash.}