Roberta J. Park has been throughout her distinguished career a scholar with a mission - to win academic recognition of the significance of the body in culture and cultures. Her scholarship has earned her global esteem in the disciplines of Physical Education and Sports Studies for its penetrating insights. This selection of her writings is a well-deserved tribute to her interpretive originality, her intellectual acuity and her ability to inspire colleagues and students. To explore unexplored patterns has been her extraordinary strength. The result has been continual originality of insight. These writings are thus a unique compilation of scholastic creativity of major interest to scholars and students in Sports Studies, Physical Education, Health Studies, Sociology and Social Psychology. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

A collection of essays, in which amateurism, both as ideology and practice, is subject to critical and unsentimental scrutiny, effectively challenging the dominant narrative of more conventional histories of British sport.

Product Description: Soft Power Politics- Past and Present: Football and Baseball on the Western Pacific Rim illustrates the momentous expanse and moment of sport in the Asia Pacific region and through these essays dealing with two of the most prodigious global team sports confronts various cultural clashes that Samuel Huntington would ensure the end of civilisation...read more

Product Description: Sport and the Emancipation of European Women: the Struggle for Self-fulfilment explores the contributions of European women to the emancipation of women worldwide. It expands understanding of the need for their attitudes and actions and celebrates their achievements in freeing the female body from unwarranted political, cultural and social restraint in the courageous pursuit of the Enlightenment 's ' secular value system: ‘the unity of mankind and basic personal freedoms and {a} world of tolerance, knowledge, education and opportunity' (from Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, 2004)...read more

Now unknown or forgotten, influential schoolmasters took the game of association football to many parts of England. They had several roles: they brought the game to individual schools, they established regional and national leagues and associations, and they founded professional football clubs. They also exported the game around the world, working as moral missionaries, passionate players and energetic entrepreneurs. The role of teachers in association football is a much neglected aspect of English cultural history. It is a story that deserves to be told because it allows a fundamental reappraisal of the status and position of these teachers in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Soccer and Society.

Product Description: 'Manufactured' Masculinity should be considered essential reading for scholars in the humanities and social sciences at every level and in all parts of the academic world. It weaves together brilliantly the elements of the 'manufacture' of masculinity in the period world-famous 'public' school system for the privileged which serviced the largest empire, the world has ever known, at the zenith of its control and which has had a significant influence in the formation of the modern world...read more

Product Description: 'Manufactured' Masculinity should be considered essential reading for scholars in the humanities and social sciences at every level and in all parts of the academic world. It weaves together brilliantly the elements of the 'manufacture' of masculinity in the period world-famous 'public' school system for the privileged which serviced the largest empire, the world has ever known, at the zenith of its control and which has had a significant influence in the formation of the modern world...read more

For more than a century, the Olympics have been the modern world's most significant sporting event. Indeed, they deserve much credit for globalizing sport beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American universe, where it originated, into broader global realms. By the 1930s, the Olympics had become a global mega-event that occupied the attention of the media, the interest of the public and the energies of nation-states. Since then, projected by television, funded by global capital and fattened by the desires of nations to garner international prestige, the Olympics have grown to gargantuan dimensions. In the course of its epic history, the Olympics have left numerous legacies, from unforgettable feats to monumental stadiums, from shining triumphs to searing tragedies, from the dazzling debuts on the world's stage of new cities and nations to notorious campaigns of national propaganda. The Olympics represent an essential component of modern global history. The Olympic movement itself has, since the 1990s, recognized and sought to shape its numerous legacies with mixed success as this book makes clear. It offers ground-breaking analyses of the power of Olympic legacies, positive and negative, and surveys the subject from Athens in 1896 to Beijing in 2008, and indeed beyond. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This volume concentrates on the processes and practices of formal education, which shaped, and were shaped by, imperial values, attitudes and behaviour. It is concerned with: The myths and visions of imperialism; The nature and extent of ethnocentric attitudes, declared and undeclared; The use of education as a means of disseminating and reinforcing imperial images; The changing concept of imperialism as reflected in the emphases of educational literature The different perceptions of imperialism in the various social and ethnic strata of metropolitan and overseas communities and education systems The assimiliation, adaptation and rejection of metropolitan educational models The issue of imperial education as enlightenment, hegemony and control. The book features chapters by educationalists, historians and sociologists on education as a cornerstone in the construction of imperial control.

Product Description: This book discusses the way in which those born into the British empire were persuaded to accept it, often with enthusiasm. The study compares the perceptions of people at ‘home’, in the dominions and in the colonies. Across the diversity of imperial territories it explores themes such as the diverse nature of political socialisation, the various agents and agencies of persuasion, reaction to the ‘experience of dominance’ by dominant and dominated, the paradoxical impact of the missionary and the subversive role of some women...read more

Product Description: This volume presents the first comparative analysis of racial attitudes in the formal schooling of both Britain and its former dominions and colonies. The various contributions examine the issue right across the British imperial experience – with case studies ranging from Canada, Ireland, East and South Africa, through the Indian subcontinent to Australia and New Zealand...read more

Product Description: The Great War has been largely ignored by historians of sport. However sport was an integral part of cultural conditioning into both physiological and psychological military efficiency in the decades leading up to it. It is time to acknowledge that the Great War also had an influence on sport in post-war European culture...read more

Product Description: The contributors to this volume examine the aspects of the cultural associations, symbolic interpretations and emotional significance of the idea of empire and, to some extent, with the post-imperial consequences. Collectively and cumulatively, their view is that sport was an important instrument of imperial cultural association and subsequent cultural change, promoting at various times and in various places imperial unity, national identity, social reform, recreational development and post-imperial goodwill...read more

Product Description: In 2008, as few in the world are unaware, China was host to the world via the Beijing Olympics. The world watched the metamorphosis of Beijing from insecure capital to confident metropolis but, aware of it or not, the world was also watching the symbolic assertion, via the Games, of a rising superpower...read more

Product Description: A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport. This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region...read more

Product Description: The late Victorian and Edwardian officer class viewed hunting and big game hunting in particular, as a sound preparation for imperial warfare. For the imperial officer in the making, the ‘blooding’ hunting ritual was a visible ‘hallmark’ of stirling martial masculinity...read more

Product Description: Beijing 2008: Preparing for Glory - Chinese Challenge in the 'Chinese Century' brings together international scholars with an interest in sport and politics and sinologists with an interest in China - past, present and future - to explore global reaction to the Beijing Olympics - China's anticipated moment of glory on the world stage...read more

Games obsessed the Victorian and Edwardian public schools. This obsession has become widely known as athleticism. Now commonly regarded as an indulgence, it was in fact much more: a combination of hedonism and idealism. This is a major study of the games ethos which dominated the lives of many Victorian and Edwardian public school boys. It includes much hitherto unpublished material about schools, people, practices and attitudes, and adds insights and subtlety to earlier, uncomplicated generalizations. Dr Mangan's readable and engrossing study of athleticism is a work of substantial and fluent scholarship. It is an original and stimulating contribution to the history of public schools, educational ideologies and secondary education which will interest the general reader as well as the social scientist, historian and educationalist.

Cricket has been subject to a number of changes. This collection of essays assesses the developments within major playing nations between the World Cups. Seeking to answer various questions, it focuses on racial and ethnic tensions and their place in the globalized, cricketing environment.

Product Description: Trial-blazer and mentor, Professor J.A. Mangan is a distinguished scholar in the fields of sports history whose work has inspired a generation of historians and social scientists across the globe. His seminal book on athleticism and imperialism commanded attention and applause from a broad range of historians and social scientists across the globe...read more

Product Description: The 2003 World Cup was of vital importance to the participating countries. For India, a world cup triumph would make cricket the nation's leading industry; for the host, South Africa, a successful campaign might realize its dream of political unity...read more

Product Description: Many historians have claimed that respectability was the sharpest line of social division in Victorian society, even that the line between the 'respectable' and 'unrespectable' was more significant than between rich and poor. This irreverent and revisionist collection argues that they have over-polarised Victorian attitudes and challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach...read more