Sports History: Reflections on My Journey So Far

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on my journey into sports history and my career path so far. I also discuss my experiences as part of the British Society of Sports History.     

Aspiration and Reflection: Sport Historians on Sport History

Abstract

Following the series of Presidential Forum conversation pieces instigated by Kevin Wamsley on the NASSH website, this piece places the context of the collection of comments and criticisms by 29 contributors to this special issue on sport historians reflecting on the field of sport history.     

On Searching for the Latin American Sportswoman and Finding an Argentine Sports Historian

Abstract

This paper is a personal account of the author’s interest in the field of sports history and its emergence in Argentina. It explores several prejudices and misunderstandings that have contributed to a limited and partial vision of this scholarly discipline.     

Emotional energy and sub-cultural politics: alternative bands in post-1997 Hong Kong

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.     

Heroes of Their Own Life Stories: Narrating the Female Self in the Feminist Age

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a triple legacy of the expressive culture of the 1960s and 70s. Late twentieth century feminism, discourses of gender equality and the advent of modern confessional culture liberated women’s women’s voices, producing self-realising narratives and a shift in women’s facility to produce authentic ‘reflexive projects of the self’. Drawing on oral history interviews with women born in the 1940s in the United Kingdom, Australia and North America, a new concept for a distinct genre of women’s oral history narrative is advanced– the feminography – in which we hear women owning their voices and the stories those voices tell.     

Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

‘Bloodhounds as Detectives’

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nineteenth-century origins of the sniffer dog in one of the most notorious homicide investigations in British history, focusing on Scotland Yard's attempts to use the reputed olfactory powers of pure-bred English bloodhounds in the hunt for London's East End serial murderer Jack the Ripper in 1888. This episode has been historiographically overlooked in part because the dogs were never actually deployed. However, the failure to unleash dogs on the Ripper's trail turns out to be critically significant, opening up a space through which the historical contingencies and social meanings of dog-breeding and training practices can be explored and scrutinized. As a crime-solving tool, utilized for the purpose of investigating metropolitan crime, canine detection posed distinct problems. Proponents of bloodhound detection had to contend with various cultural, material and practical challenges, in order to guarantee the canines as reliable hunters in an environment that was contaminated by slum odour.     

‘A Dangerous Revolutionary Force Amongst Us’

ABSTRACT

Historians of nineteenth-century British tea consumption have highlighted the function of the substance as an index of middle-class civility and marker of national identity. In this article, I maintain that concerns about tea drinking were equally prominent throughout the late Victorian period. As medical practitioners increasingly intervened in food matters, apprehension about the physiological and psychological consequences of increasing access to tea in working-class communities proliferated. This pessimistic discourse can be firmly situated in the context of broader debates about national decline, physical and mental deterioration, the subversion of gender roles in the domestic sphere and Imperial expansion.