Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876-1926

by S. W. Pope

Overview

In Patriotic Games, historian Stephen Pope explores the ways sport was transformed from a mere amusement into a metaphor for American life. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, sport became the most pervasive popular cultural activity in American society. During these years, basketball was invented, football became a mass spectator event, and baseball soared to its status as the "national pasttime." Pope demonstrates how America's sporting tradition emerged from a society fractured along class, race, ethnic, and gender lines. Institutionalized sport became a trans- class mechanism for packaging power and society in preferred ways—it popularized an interlocking set of cultural ideas about America's quest for national greatness. Nowhere was this more evident than the intimate connection established between sport and national holiday celebrations. As Pope reveals, Thanksgiving sports influenced the holiday's evolution from a religious occasion to a secular one. On the Fourth of July, sporting events infused patriotic rituals with sentiments that emphasized class conciliation and ethnic assimilation. In a time of social tensions, economic downturns, and unprecedented immigration, the rituals and enthusiasms of sport, Pope argues, became a central component in the shaping of America's national identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195091335
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/27/1997
Series:	Sports and History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.95(d)
Lexile:	1730L (what's this?)

About the Author

S. W. Pope is an Instructor at the University of Southern Maine.

Editorial Reviews

"This thoroughly readable work is highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty collections."—CHOICE

"[A] valuable addition to sports history scholarship....Patriotic Games is gracefully written and explores more fully and satisfactorily than any previous book the relationship between nationalism and American sports in the years between the American centennial in 1876 and the sesquicentennial in 1926."—The Journal of American History

From the Publisher

Examines the rise of sport and America's sporting ideology, telling a story that illuminates the deepest working of a society coping with social tension, economic dislocation, and unprecedented immigration. The author suggests that the study of sports ascension offers a unique window into a larger historical process whereby men and women, social classes, and racial and ethnic groups struggled over different versions of not only how to work and play, but what to value. Addresses the military's embrace of athletics in war-preparedness training, which did much to popularize sports in the public mind. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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