Browse

The present study examines the early wooden facilities and grounds of American college football within National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision and Ivy League schools from 1869 through 1903. Within, we identify what set of events and opportunities led to the development of the earliest football playing spaces. Furthermore, we recognize and explain what patterns of construction and renovation influenced the creation of permanent stadia. Critical environmental conditions that impacted the spread of knowledge about football and its playing grounds are recognized in addition to specific rules, which influenced the evolution of fields and facilities. Finally, we recognize the importance of facility enclosure and interests in producing revenues, and feature discussion on the movement of games from off- to on-campus while offering a collective picture of what these places looked like as potential synedochial social anchors for their institutions.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a unique style of figure skating developed in Great Britain. This style emphasized long, flowing glides at high speed with a stiff, upright body posture. It contrasted with the International style, a type of skating developed on the Continent that favored brisk limb movements and showy tricks, such as jumps and spins. English skaters saw the International style as effeminate, while their own represented their idea of masculinity and allowed them to express their national identity. After the founding of the International Skating Union in 1892, British skaters found it necessary to adopt the International style to be competitive. Women proved better able to do so than men, and Madge Syers won the gold in the 1908 Olympics. Over time, the process of transnational exchange enacted through international competition resulted in the near-disappearance of the English style.

This article examines the history of synchronized swimming in Ontario, with a specific focus on Peterborough, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Two factors explain the rise and consolidation of “synchro” as a women’s sport in the period. The first factor relates to earlier changes in women’s sport in the interwar period, alongside the rise of modern hegemonic beauty culture. As synchro struggled for official recognition, coaches and swimmers embraced feminine beauty constructs to generate popularity for their sport. The second factor relates to the nationalistic approach to sport development in the 1940s and 1950s. Financial and ideological investment in sport as important for national health and physical fitness allowed synchro to grow and flourish. As exemplified by the Peterborough club, these two factors allowed Canadian women to play a formative role in the national and international development of synchro as a sport to produce fit and beautiful bodies.

The Supreme Council for Sport in Africa announced that all independent African nations would boycott all British sport if the British Lions rugby team toured South Africa in 1974. Despite condemnation from segments of the British public, entreaties from government ministers, and African threats, the rugby tour went ahead. This article adds to a large body of scholarship on the struggle against apartheid in sport, within which the 1974 Lions tour has received little attention, and focuses on the transnational efforts to stop that tour led by Kenya and independent Africa. Calls for reprisals across the continent were not unanimous, and the disparity of African reactions challenges perceptions of the “Africa bloc” as a monolith guaranteed to maintain a united front on anti-apartheid sport activity. Reactions to the tour anticipated events two years later at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and this event became a test case for strategies designed to isolate South Africa through punitive actions against third-party nations that broke ranks.

This article analyzes Soviet hockey as a transnational phenomenon by underlining three international events that marked milestones in the domestication of hockey in the country and in the Sovietization of international hockey. Focusing on the period of the massification of the sport in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, it interprets the appropriation and transformation of a Canadian sport in the Soviet reality through the analytical tools of cultural translation and hybridization. It is this period of great cultural and social transformation, first in the xenophobic context of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign that took place during late Stalinism, and later in the internationalist enthusiasm that characterized Khrushchev’s Thaw, that ice hockey has been sovietized. That process neccessitated the translation of a foreign cultural object in Soviet languages and semiotic tools. Meanwhile, international hockey itself underwent a profound hybridization process to which the Soviets greatly contributed.

Professional golf architects emerged in the early twentieth century across the English-speaking world. These new professionals coalesced around ideas that promoted a Scottish national conception of proper golf. When golf first migrated from the Scottish coasts inland, south into England, and across the oceans to the United States and the British Dominions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, no standardized form or set of ideals on Golf course architecture existed. Through their collective writings, professional golf architects from Britain, the United States, and Canada codified the values, design principles, and the romance of the ancient Scottish linksland courses as the standard way to design and construct golf courses. We therefore position golf courses as important sites of historical inquiry into the transmission of national styles. These Golden Age (1910–37) golf architects thus encouraged the transnational exchange of sport through the construction of golf courses in a peculiarly Scottish sense.