Product Description: Two leading sports authorities explore the culture of soccer around the world, considering the sport as a means to better understand a society's past, present, and future. • Includes both men's and women's soccer • Features lists of winners of World Cups, regional confederations cups, and Olympic Games • Provides sidebars of interesting facts and photos to supplement the text • Offers a multi-disciplinary perspective from across geography, social studies, world cultures, and anthropology...read more

Product Description: The field of sports history is no longer a fledgling area of study. There is a great vitality in the field and it has matured dramatically over the past decade. Reflecting changes to traditional approaches, sport historians need now to engage with contemporary debates about history, to be encouraged to position themselves and their methodologies in relation to current epistemological issues, and to promote the importance of reflecting on the literary or poetic dimensions of producing history...read more

Product Description: The Long Run to Freedom: Sport, Cultures and Identities in South Africa analyzes the meaning attached to sport in South African societies, past and present. It explores the history and changing meanings attached to particular sports in the old and new South Africas, and the ways in which sport is being used in the present...read more

Product Description: Sport studies has become one of the largest and fastest growing international industries. This collection of essays from a range of international contributors analyzes all aspects of the political economy of this industry, including media sports production, urban growth politics and capital accumulation and the economic effects of Olympism...read more

Product Description: Problems within modern sports are proliferating. Fraud, drug use and other health-damaging consequences of high performance sports have revealed that the idea of sport as a healthy and educational enterprise is nothing but an illusion...read more

Product Description: As Sydney prepares to host the 2000 Olympic games, this study assesses the cultural impact of sport on the Australasian countries. Here, as in other parts of the world, sport is taken as an assertion of both individual and group identity, a demonstration of modernity and a source of personal, local and regional esteem...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book explores the expansion of rugby from its imperial and amateur upper-class white male core into other contexts throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of rugby in the racially divided communities of the setter empire and how this was viewed are explored initially...read more

Product Description: This text looks at how an understanding of rugby can provide insight into what it has meant to "be a man" in societies influenced by the ideals of Victorian upper and middle classes. It shows that rugby has been a means of promoting male exclusivity, but also been a means of cultural incorporation...read more