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sports

  • 9/26/2021

    Group of Historians Recognized for Best SCOTUS Brief of the Year

    by Ronald A. Smith

    A group of six historians has been recognized by the Education Law Association for the best Supreme Court brief of the year. Their historical deconstruction of the myth of amateurism in college athletics influenced a unanimous decision that the NCAA cannot bar college athletes from profiting from the commercial use of their names, images, or likenesses.

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    7/21/2021

    Why Japan Forfeited Hosting the 1940 Games

    by Paul Droubie

    Japan's forfeiture of the games amid rising international and internal tensions shows that the Olympics have always been a vehicle for the promotion of national elites' agendas, often at the expense of popular domestic concerns. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    7/12/2021

    Abolish the Olympics

    Natalie Shure argues that the Games impose too many costs on their host cities to justify a short-lived athletic spectacle. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    7/8/2021

    What Euro 2020 Has Revealed About Englishness

    Sporting teams are one of the few officially English, as opposed to British, institutions. The national team's multiracial composition and embrace of social and political causes may be advancing a more inclusive form of Englishness. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    5/27/2021

    Billie Jean King, Foremother

    by Robert Lipsyte

    Billie Jean King's legacy runs far beyond tennis, and has become even more relevant with the passage of time as challenges to the doctrine of amateurism and the NCAA make clear. 

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    4/3/2021

    Women’s College Sports Was Growing. Then the NCAA Took Over

    The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was pushed aside by the NCAA as universities dedicated more resources to women's sports to comply with Title IX. Critics say that the NCAA has not followed through on the need for equity while squeezing out women coaches and athletic administrators.

  • 3/28/2021

    Will the Supreme Court Uphold the NCAA's Version of Amateurism?

    by Ronald A. Smith

    A pending Supreme Court case will test whether the NCAA can bar student athletes from making money from products that make use of their images, a form of property right of "Name, Image, or Likeness." A historian who wrote an amicus brief says the NCAA's claim to protect the amateurism of the athletes is selective and hypocritical.

  • SOURCE: Tampa Bay News Weekly
    3/3/2021

    Historian Unjustly Forced to Walk the Plank

    by Michael E. Carter

    When a historian published an editoral about the history of piracy near Tampa Bay during Super Bowl Week, right-wing media took an effort to present historical knowledge as evidence of a liberal culture war, subjecting them to harassment and threats in their own cancel culture campaign. Is the goal to intimidate historians from weighing in? 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    2/23/2021

    Japanese Internment, Football, and a Legendary Team

    Dave Zirin's Edge of Sports podcast hosts Bradford Pearson, the author of "The Eagles of Heart Mountain," the story of a group of interned Japanese American teens whose football team dominated the state of Wyoming. 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    2/8/2021

    Henry Aaron and American Memory

    by Robert Greene II

    "The memories of Jackie Robinson and Henry Aaron, two Americans reviled by many of their compatriots during their playing days but embraced by virtually everyone now, are but the sports phase of a nationwide problem—the problem of properly remembering a painful past."