Sport In American Culture

A unique and timely exploration of the cultural impact of sport on American society, including lifestyles, language, and thinking. Sport in American Culture is the first and only reference work to provide an in-depth and up-to-date exploration of sport and its impact on American culture. Essays from more than 200 scholars, professionals, and sports enthusiasts address how sport has changed our lifestyles, language, and thinking. Arranged alphabetically, the work introduces key sport figures and national icons, with a focus on their cultural impact, examines individual sports and how they have influenced society, and discusses such phenomena as the billion-dollar athletic apparel industry, sport as big business, and the effect of sport on gender, racial views, pride, and nationalism. In addition to expected topics, the work also includes less studied areas such as myths, audience rituals, Wheaties, comic books, the hula hoop, and religion.

A provocative, must-read investigation that both appreciates the importance of—and punctures the hype around—big-time contemporary American athletics In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality—impervious to DVR, evoking ancient religious rites—makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier—from hot take journalism formats to the creeping infestation of advertising to social media celebrity schemes. More importantly, sports are sold as an oasis of community to a nation deeply divided: They are escapist, apolitical, the only tie that binds. In fact, precisely because they appear allegedly “above politics,” sports are able to smuggle potent messages about inequality, patriotism, labor, and race to massive audiences. And as the wider culture works through shifting gender roles and masculine power, those anxieties are also found in the experiences of female sports journalists, athletes, and fans, and through the coverage of violence by and against male bodies. Sports, rather than being the one thing everyone can agree on, perfectly encapsulate the roiling tensions of modern American life. Michael Serazio maps and critiques the cultural production of today’s lucrative, ubiquitous sports landscape. Through dozens of in-depth interviews with leaders in sports media and journalism, as well as in the business and marketing of sports, The Power of Sports goes behind the scenes and tells a story of technological disruption, commercial greed, economic disparity, military hawkishness, and ideals of manhood. In the end, despite what our myths of escapism suggest, Serazio holds up a mirror to sports and reveals the lived realities of the nation staring back at us.

The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture--both at home and abroad--against communism. In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.

Sport dominates television and the mass media. Politics and business are a-bustle with sports metaphors. Endorsements by athletes sell us products. "Home run," "slam dunk," and the rest of the vocabulary of sport color daily conversation. Even in times of crisis and emergency, the media reports the scores and highlights. Marky Dyreson delves into how our obsession with sport came into being with a close look at coverage of the Olympic Games between 1896 and 1912. How people reported and consumed information on the Olympics offers insight into how sport entered the heart of American culture as part of an impetus for social reform. Political leaders came to believe in the power of sport to revitalize the "republican experiment." Sport could instill a new sense of national identity that would forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order while at the same time linking America's intellectual and power elite with the experiences of the masses.

This exciting, accessible introduction to the field of Sports Studies is the most comprehensive guide yet to the relationships between sport, culture and society. Taking an international perspective, Sport, Culture and Society provides students with the insight they need to think critically about the nature of sport, and includes: a clear and comprehensive structure unrivalled coverage of the history, culture, media, sociology, politics and anthropology of sport coverage of core topics and emerging areas extensive original research and new case study material. The book offers a full range of features to help guide students and lecturers, including essay topics, seminar questions, key definitions, extracts from primary sources, extensive case studies, and guides to further reading. Sport, Culture and Society represents both an important course resource for students of sport and also sets a new agenda for the social scientific study of sport.

Co-authored by two of the world's foremost experts on sports culture, one American and one European, this book draws on both the outsider's perspective and that of the insider to explain American sports culture. With extensive use of examples and illustrations, the development of American sport from the 19 th century until the present day is explained with reference to political, social, gender and economic issues.

One day in front of the television would convince any alien that the entirety of American culture is built around sports. Politics and business are abustle with sports metaphors and endorsements by athletes. "Home runs," "bottom of the ninth," "fourth and ten," "slam dunk," and similar phrases litter the daily vocabulary. No matter how dire the news, sports will be reported as usual. How did this single-minded fascination come to be? Mark Dyreson locates the invasion of sport at the heart of American culture at the turn of the century. It was then that social reformers and political leaders believed that sport could revitalize the "republican experiment," that a new sense of national identity could forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order as it would serve to link America's thinking classes with the experiences of the masses. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in American accounts of the Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912. In connecting sport to American history and culture, Dyreson has stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts