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Sport participation promotes health benefits for children. Current media and scientific coverage of sport-related head injury may influence a parent's decision on sports participation. Physicians must understand what influences these decisions to effectively counsel patients and families. This study sought to better understand and quantify the parental decisions to allow/disallow collision sports, including football participation. A 31-question survey related to child/parent demographics, sports history, and influences to allow/disallow sport participation was available to parents in the United States through a national volunteer registry, between November 2016 and September 2019. Pearson's chi-squared and Wilcoxon's signed-rank test were used to analyze categorical and continuous variables, respectively. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to identify the most powerful factors associated with the decision. Of the 884 responses, 430 (49%) parents would disallow collision sport participation and 334 (38%) would disallow football. Parents who would allow collision sports more commonly cited child desire, while those parents who would disallow cited safety concern as the greatest influence to generally disallow a sport. Those who would disallow reported doctors (35.1% vs 25.3%; P = 0.002), media (12.8% vs 7.3%; P = 0.006) and other parents (11.2% vs 7.3%; P = 0.045) as influences. A child's age (OR 1.039, 95%CI 1.007–1.073; P = 0.018) was independently associated with their parent responding that they would allow collision sports. Parent educational status showed that those with higher than a bachelor's degree would be less likely to allow football participation (OR 0.635, 95%CI 0.443–0.910; P = 0.013). Parents incorporate many sources of information into the decision to allow or disallow their child to participate in collision sports. A child's desire to play a sport and child safety are driving factors for parents faced with the decision of whether to allow participation in collision sports. Physician input is more frequently influential to parents than the media, underscoring the responsibility of physicians to engage families on the risks, benefits, and resources available for sport participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses topics within this special issue on the role of sport in the history of the West, focusing particularly on the interrelationship between sports and Hispanic Americans in the West of the U.S.

The article discusses the life and career of the late Finnish long-distance runner Paavo Nurmi, and it mentions the gold and silver medals that Nurmi won at several Olympic Games during the twentieth century, as well as information about Nurmi's exhibition tour of the U.S. in 1925. Nurmi's role as a popular culture icon is examined, along with additional international sports celebrities such as Italian marathoner Dorando Pietri and distance runner Hannes Kolehmainen.

The article discusses a reexamination of sport in relation to American Exceptionalism and the concept of the U.S. as a transoceanic empire as of 2015. American territories such as Puerto Rico are addressed, along with U.S. sports history and foreign relations. The views of British and American sports historians such as Ernest May, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Trevor B. McCrisken are examined, as well as U.S. history between the colonial era and the nineteenth century.

The article discusses the author's views about a decision by the journal's editorial board and Editor Don Morrow to re-publish an essay that the author wrote in 2007, and it mentions a call for additional critical transnational analyses of American sports history. Issues involving imperialism and American Exceptionalism are examined, along with the late historian Frederick Jackson Turner's American frontier thesis. Western U.S. history and Barbara Keys' book "Globalizing Sport" are assessed.

Background: The purpose of this study was to determine if earlier age of first exposure to football is associated with worse brain health in middle-aged and older adult men who played high school football. Methods: Men from the United States, aged 35 and older, who reported playing high school football, completed a customized, online health survey via the Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) platform. Survey items included physical, psychological, and cognitive symptoms over the past week and over the past year, sports participation history (including age of first exposure to football), medical history, and concussion history. Participants also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8) and the British Columbia Post-Concussion Symptom Inventory (BC-PSI). Results: There were 186 men (age M = 51.78, SD = 10.93) who participated in high school football, and 87 (46.8%) reported football participation starting before the age of 12 and 99 (53.2%) reported football participation at or after the age of 12. Those who started playing football at an earlier age reported a greater number of lifetime concussions (M = 1.95, SD = 1.79) compared to those who started playing at age 12 or later (M = 1.28, SD = 1.52; U = 3,257.5, p = 0.003). A similar proportion of men who played football before vs. after the age of 12 reported a lifetime history of being prescribed medications for depression, anxiety, chronic pain, headaches, or memory problems. When comparing men who played football before vs. after the age of 12, the groups did not differ significantly in their ratings of depression, anger, anxiety, headaches, migraines, neck or back pain, chronic pain, concentration problems, or memory problems over the past week or the past year. The two groups did not differ significantly in their ratings of current symptoms of depression (PHQ-8; U = 4,187.0, p = 0.74) or post-concussion-like symptoms (BC-PSI; U = 3,944.0, p = 0.53). Furthermore, there were no statistically significant correlations between the age of first exposure to football, as a continuous variable, and PHQ-8 or BC-PSI scores. Conclusion: This study adds to a rapidly growing body of literature suggesting that earlier age of first exposure to football is not associated with later-in-life brain health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the history of professional baseball and football structures in the United States since the mid-19th century. It explores how these structures have developed during this period and examines how they have become entertainment venues designed to maximize profits. It examines the events, opportunities and constraints that have influenced the development of these venues and explores what future venues will likely look like. It discusses the influence sports facilities have on a community and examines issues related to construction costs, naming rights, capacity and various logistical aspects of stadium-building.

The article presents sports history research on the first permanent non-wooden baseball parks and football stadiums constructed in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century, focusing on facilities used by teams in major league baseball and professional football. The first such structure was Harvard Stadium, the football stadium of Harvard University which opened in 1903. The concept that the construction of such facilities was seen as part of overall progress in economic and social development by the cities and towns in which they were located is considered, as his how sports facility location affected those cities' growth. The facilities, while often of considerable architectural merit, underwent consistent and expensive renovation and expansion due to technological changes such as lighting and the need for broadcasting facilities. Extra seating to generate more revenue and to accommodate more spectators due to the increased popularity of the two sports was also added on a consistent basis.

The article discusses the history of baseball and football stadiums in the U.S. and examines the development of functional sports stadiums in the later half of the 20th century. The similarities between all of these stadiums are described and the relationship between U.S. social and economic conditions and stadium development is explored. Details are provided about the increasing popularity of sports and the massive population growth in the post-World War Two era. According to the article, increased travel technology and the development of U.S. sports also aided in the stadium development movement.

The article discusses the effort to integrate the eight teams of the Pacific Coast League from 1948 to 1952 in the United States. It notes that the effort to examine integration in the minor leagues will provide a better understanding of the integration process in Major League Baseball as well as insight on the social conditions in the West. The article also discusses the history of the segregation in baseball and the life of baseball player John Franklin Ritchey.

The article examines the effort of the Pacific Coast League (PCL) to become a third major baseball league in the United States in the 1940s. It notes that the effort of PCL was influenced by its initiative to gain control of the West Coast baseball market. The article also discusses the factors which led to the failure of PCL to become a third major league and its implications on the organized expansion process of baseball.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses his essay on the late Finnish long-distance runner Paavo Nurmi which appears in the same issue of the journal, and it mentions sports research, the book "The Sports Immortals" by Will Grimsley, and Nurmi's 1925 American exhibition tour.

Professional sports leagues play a major role in our society, but little attention has been given to organizational factors related to league survival. We address this issue by examining the effects of related agglomeration (the extent to which league teams are located near teams from other sports that share the same broad professional sport identity), sport age, market heterogeneity (high variance in the number of teams from other sports in its teams' cities), and within-sport league competition (high niche overlap) on league mortality. Related agglomeration may lead to intensified competition but may also lead to benefits by producing agglomeration economies and by driving the development of regional identities. We propose that the effects of related agglomeration vary over a focal population's life cycle. We also argue that leagues with high market heterogeneity have higher chances of failure, particularly under conditions of high competition. We test our ideas using event history analysis to examine mortality in the entire population history of professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada (which are fundamentally different from leagues in other parts of the world) from the first league founding in 1871 until 1997. We find that leagues in young sports whose teams tend to be located in cities with large numbers of other sports (high related agglomeration) suffer from higher mortality rates while leagues that are in more established sports are less likely to fail under these circumstances. Consistent with prior research, leagues are more likely to fail when they experience higher competition (higher niche overlap) with other leagues in their sport, and the effects of competition are exacerbated by high variance in the number of other sports across the leagues' cities (high market heterogeneity). We end by discussing the implications of our results for more common multi-unit organizational forms such as franchises and by considering promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, Olympic Gold medallist marathoner Frank Shorter and other Olympic athletes advocated for reforms to the American amateur athletic system. Their efforts culminated in the passage of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and the eventual move to greater professionalization in Olympic sports. Historians of sport have asserted various reasons for the success that amateur athletes had in spurring Congress to enact changes to the amateur system in the 1970s. These explanations include the importance of the Cold War context, the US's declining Olympic performance, the rise of collective organization by amateur athletes, and the increased monetization of the Olympics and some amateur sports like long-distance running. A close examination of Shorter's efforts to reform the amateur system adds to the historical dialogue on this issue by showing that part of the success of amateur athletes in the 1970s stemmed from their articulation of the problems of, and solutions to, amateurism in the language of deregulation. Such language in a time period of ascendant conservatism gelled perfectly with Congressional leaders who wanted to make American athletes more competitive but without increasing the power of the federal government or moving it into the area of regulating amateur sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To suggest some means of writing "better" history, this paper builds upon E. P. Thompson's notion of history as the "discipline of context." Rather than just a rendering of past actuality, according to Thompson, history is a body of knowledge which derives from the interrelating, the integrating, the weaving together of strands of evidence that point to change or continuity in human life in the past. The historian does this networking, this interweaving, in every phase of his or her work—as one derives researchable questions, locates and works with the evidence, and shapes conceptualizations and explanatory schemes. The discussion presents examples of both the process and the product of "contexting" in all of these phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article surveys the history of sport museums and halls of fame and discusses the ways they provide insight into the development and nature of contemporary sport, with special focus on the United States, where the sports hall of fame is a peculiar institution. America's sports heritage movement continues to flourish and show further signs of expansion. Commercialism and sponsorship, hero-worship and religion, amateurism and professionalism are but a few among the plethora of social phenomena and institutions involved in the heritage of sport. They will continue to reflect the place and values of sport in society in a unique manner.

This article examines a key aspect of American sports history within a transnational context. Whilst the internal histories of American sport are exceedingly rich and voluminous, our general understanding of the nation’s contribution to the international, global scene is less well-known. The postcolonial rivalries between American and British sports communities fuelled the development of what became open, international cup competitions in such sports as tennis and golf which bolstered an emerging global industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The transnational process of initial American imitation and absorption of British models have been well documented within the scholarly literature and debates in American Studies for decades; however, the gradual reversal of this imitative process to a more reciprocal relationship has received far less attention (especially within sports history). The authors show how the Davis Cup competition is an example of the way in which Americans indigenised a cultural sporting import, namely tennis; created a nationalistic, international sporting competition; and effectively exported it back to Britain within the wider context of a burgeoning, imperial rivalry on the world stage between these two, rival sporting nations. This process not only expanded the worldwide consumption of sport but spreads a spirit of cultural emulation within twentieth-century global consumer culture. This transnational perspective also illuminates the thorough de-provincialising of the notion of “American Exceptionalism” within the field. When, for example, the respective imperial histories of the two nations are considered comparatively, the “American” story does not look so “exceptional” after all. Though American exceptionalism adapted some British sports to suit American sensibilities, the sporting cultures of the two nations and within their zones of influence remained similar in many respects. This was particularly true in amateur sports such as tennis, rowing and track and field (athletics to the Brits) as well as in the sport of golf. In the twentieth century, many sports adapted as focus shifted from nationalism and national worth towards professionalism and international spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of sports business and its involvement in corporate philanthropy, citing the history of United Center, home arena of the U.S. National Basketball Association's (NBA) Bulls and the National Hockey League's (NHL) Blackhawks. Topic include Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz's private financing strategies, demand for public subsidies or tax breaks for the arena, and public-private partnerships.

This is an exploratory study of sporting news in selected issues of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper from 1885 to 1895. Asking how the illustrated press portrayed sports and sporting events in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the authors analyzed pictorial content to understand how the ethos of realism was employed in pictorial representations of sports. During this period in journalism history, visual journalism was in transition. Photographic reproduction in newspapers was still being developed and perfected, so illustrating pictorial news content was still widely practiced. Using Thomas Connery's "paradigm of actuality" thesis, the researchers developed an "actuality" scale to help identify how realism was used to report on both amateur and professional sports in illustrated news reporting. In this exploratory study, the authors attempt to reveal how pictorial news about sports changed over time and suggest how connections between actuality and the cultural messages found in late nineteenth-century pictorial sports reporting can provide clues to intended audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a historical overview of the practice of early sport specialization, primarily in the United States. Sport specialization as practiced by young athletes has been a common occurrence in several individual sports for more than 60 years. More recently, focusing on one sport has gained traction as common practice for young athletes involved in team sports. Sport specialization as a topic of research inquiry has been examined by various disciplines in kinesiology to determine the efficacy of the practice, the physiological effects, and the advantages and disadvantages, as well as to offer possible solutions to the drawbacks associated with sport specialization. Popular press outlets, including newspapers, books, magazines, and online sources, have also joined the debate over the merits of sport specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1930 and 1945 professional wrestling could lay claim to being one of the most transnational sports moving across the Anglo-world. Participants originated from western and eastern Europe, North America, the Antipodes, Britain and India. Significantly, wrestling was one of the few sports in which participants from the British Empire and the USA competed in these decades of comparative sporting isolationism. It is argued here that the ‘All-In’ American style which came to dominate the sport as an extreme and theatrical form of ‘catch-as-catch-can’ wrestling was not uniformly accepted across the Anglo-world. Cultural differences between the USA and the British Empire meant wrestling styles had to be adapted as they crossed national boundaries. The notion of ‘cultural hybridity’ is a valuable concept here as ‘All-In’ met three different responses within the Empire: complete acceptance, modification and rejection. The reasons for the varied responses are considered and the argument made that while American culture was at one level admired in the British Empire, there was also concern about perceived professionalization and corruption in North America, which wrestling seemed to epitomize. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article discusses the events leading up to the formation of the organization the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH). It examines the role of Pennsylvania State University professor Guy Maxton Lewis in publicizing the need for an organization such as NASSH, an endorsement of Lewis's plans by University of Illinois dean Seward Staley, and marketing efforts by Lewis to organize the NASSH. The article also examines the significance of the sports studies graduate student culture at the University of Massachusetts.

Men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse share a name, but their histories differ. Both sports developed and became organised in close concert with the race, class and gender expectations of the eras. As a result, the sports began with rules that reflected those norms. Over time, the sports developed separately and generated unique forms, even as they sustained moments of interaction. Therefore, men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse are different sports. Using comparisons as the mode through which to view the sports, this article explores the organised beginnings of men's lacrosse and women's lacrosse to establish that the sports began and continued within identity-based norms. Through the discussion of the practical distinctions and critical understandings of the differences between the games, the author poses that these dissimilarities are relevant in considerations of the separate sports as they continue to change in the larger US sporting context. As sports such as basketball demonstrate, these arguments matter because broad-scale comparisons of women's sports to men's frequently render women's sport participants, and the sports they play, inferior. Notably, women's lacrosse participants also employed comparisons to distinguish and claim their history as unique from that of men's lacrosse. A comparative analysis highlights points of disjuncture between the sports and contextualises the importance of gender in the articulations of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the state of the academic field of sports history. The author examines the contributions sports history has made to history, developments in methodology that have impacted sports history, and the cultural significance of sports and sports history in the U.S., particularly concerning concepts of labor, capitalism, and class, religion, and race. The article also discusses the role of journalists in sports history, academic professionalism, and the cultural approach to sports history.

An essay about Choctaws and earthworks of the Native Ameriacns in the Southeastern U.S. is presented. The author suggests that Native ball games were integral to the growth of the Choctaws of the 21st century. The previous essay "The Story of America: A Tribalography" written by the author is highlighted.

This chapter offers a new and extensive analysis of the role of the historical profession in the writing of sports history in Britain, France and the United States with additional reference to Germany, Italy and Australia. The aim is to show in depth how the form and content of the various approaches taken by historians from the 1960s to the present compares to those trained in the social sciences and in physical education. The chapter has three parts: it looks first at the differing national traditions of historical writing on sport by historians; then it examines their relationship to that of sociologists, anthropologists and physical educators; finally, these differing disciplinary perspectives are critically examined in detail through concrete examples drawn from both traditional and modern sports in Britain, Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the past, present, and future of historical research in sport and physical education. Due to time and space limitations, the focus is on work that has emerged and is emerging in North America-particularly the United States--but it must be noted there are very active sport historians throughout the world; in departments of kinesiology, history, and American studies. This article covers two broad categories: the past to the present and the present to the future of research in sport history. Within these two sections, there is also an analysis of changes in the conduct of research by historians as this has had, and will continue to have, a major impact on the kinds of work that will be produced in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the the authors discuss the journal's featured topic of U.S. national pastimes and their relationship to U.S. national identity and characteristics.

This article examines how hunting came to define the American identity in the nineteenth century and how that identity became increasingly restricted to rural, white males in the twentieth century. The tie between hunting and identity began at colonisation, when promoters portrayed North America as a hunter's paradise. Colonial charters, meanwhile, guaranteed colonists the right to hunt. Because colonists associated hunting with both aristocratic indolence and Indian ‘savagery’, however, they seldom deemed it important. Not until the American Revolution did writers and artists transform seemingly Hobbesian hunters into powerful defenders of natural rights. In the Jacksonian era, Americans identified hunters as culture heroes, men whose ‘self-possession’ made them exemplary. The near-universal right to hunt – a right carried over from colonial times – seemed to complement and buttress widening political rights. Both sorts of rights provided a bulwark against aristocracy. For a time – roughly from 1850 to 1950 – Americans viewed hunting as a font of their greatness. Since then, however, Americans, shaped by the Civil Rights Movement – African-Americans, women, urbanites – have rejected the hunter heroes of old, who seem more like oppressors than liberators. Hunting has become a badge of identity not for all Americans, but for rural whites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This discussion focuses on how the rise of America's national sporting pastimes, during the period 1880–1920, was inextricably tied to the ambitions and outpourings of American print capitalism and a concomitant congealing of a sense of modern American nationhood. In examining this thematic, we explicate the manner in which American national sporting audiences during the period 1880–1920 were variously constituted through discourses of national and ethnic sporting difference or Otherness. Hence, we examine the popular representation of turn of the century rodeo practices (as narrated through the spectacle of the western showman William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody's Wild West show productions), the position of early-twentieth-century American baseball in relation to other sporting cultures (graphically depicted by Albert Goodwill, or A.G., Spalding's promotional publications, specifically the 1911America's National Game) and the national and ethnic differences discerned within the global sporting landscape more generally (explicated within the 1919National Geographicarticle ‘The Geography of Games’). These performances and representations of ethnic and national sporting Otherness played an important role in re-inscribing and legitimating the (White European American) normative core of American sport culture (as manifest within and through the dominant practices of playing and/or spectating of football, baseball and basketball). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American colleges in the nineteenth century rejected British cricket for baseball and British soccer and British rugby for American football. While Americans copied British culture in many ways, they were often not direct copies. The historical concept of American Exceptionalism has been questioned by historians, but if there ever was an American Exceptionalism, the cases for the American games of organised baseball and football surely can be made. The actions of several individuals and influence of a variety of forces insured the creation of and dominance of American football as the intercollegiate sport of choice by the turn of the nineteenth century. In American institutions of higher education ‘gridiron football', in the vernacular of that era, represented the nascent ‘national pastime' that triumphed on US campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that ‘baseball-as-the-national-pastime' is a fine example of the ‘narrative construction of reality' concept advanced by psychologist Jerome Bruner. That is, baseball's endlessly self-pronounced, fictional claim to being the American ‘national-pastime' has run its course. By this late date, it is exhausted but not dead, sacked by the National Football League and many other sports and pastimes in an increasingly fragmented, heterogeneous culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay provides an overview of the efforts made by African Americans to compete with and against their white counterparts on an equal basis in highly organised sport in the USA. These efforts have resulted in a relatively large number of African Americans participating in football, basketball, and track and very small representation in baseball, golf, tennis, stock car racing and a host of other national pastimes. A result of historical context and racism in a capitalist society, this fact has not deterred young African Americans from seeking success in sport because they view it as the only alternative to welfare, crime and life on the streets. Unfortunately, for the largest majority of impoverished young African Americans, success in sport never comes to pass and the American dream is ultimately never fully realised. Even those African Americans who managed to overcome racial barriers and achieve success in sport have done so without any opportunity of gaining some control of an institution that is extraordinarily important in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers the history of the American private golf club with special emphasis on the period between 1880 and 1930. It argues that the private club movement was uniquely strong in the 1920s and particularly strong for the period between 1923 and 1930. This is true for a number of reasons, one of which was the dramatic rise in private debt. The private golf club lost its hold on American golf and golfers after 1930. The essay suggests a number of reasons why this should be so. But clearly American golf turned steadily to public courses as its main venue after 1930. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the diffusion of disc golf across the continental U.S. We provide a descriptive analysis of the spatial distribution of the sport beginning with its formal inception in 1975 through 2010. We investigate the role of common macro-level factors in determining the diffusion of sports facilities, such as population and land availability. We also consider the role of micro-level factors in influencing the diffusion of disc golf at the individual level. Our results demonstrate that disc golf has diffused rapidly and thoroughly throughout the U.S. Several disc golf regions have developed, including the upper Midwest, the mid-Atlantic I-95 corridor, and the Pacific Coast. Population has been an important determinant of diffusion patterns, with contagious diffusion evident at the local level. Disc golf facilities can be found in demographically diverse communities, however the overwhelming majority of disc golfers are white, creating an unintentional cultural barrier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deploying liberal multiculturalist discourse, the media depicts professional basketball as a post-racial space where all talented players, regardless of their race, can thrive if they work hard. An analysis of the construction of non-white players in the 1930s and in 2010 demonstrates sport as modulated by racially charged discourse. As part of a liberal multiculturalist frame, the coding of basketball players as hero, threat and novelty serve to privilege whiteness and replicate racialized and gendered images that can be traced to the 1930s. In doing so, the article highlights how liberal multiculturalism involves racial triangulation and the simultaneous processes of hyper-racialization and de-racialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between Chinese sport and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. According to the authors, this ideological movement used sport as a political tool to reinforce Chinese Communist Party (CCP) values, improve China's international political image, and unite urban and peasant athletes. Particular focus is given to the CCP slogan Friendship First, Competition Second, which was used to guide sports issues in both domestic and foreign policy. Topics discussed include mass participation in sports programs, the role of table tennis competitions in diplomacy, and Chinese relations with the U.S. and with Third World countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.