Rule Britannia
Author: Matthew P. Llewellyn
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
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Rule Britannia: Nationalism, Identity and the Modern Olympic Games
Author: Matthew Llewellyn
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2024-10-14
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781032926360
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores complex political, imperial, and identity issues that shaped Britain's Olympic participation throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
Rule Britannia: Nationalism, Identity and the Modern Olympic Games
Author: Matthew P. Llewellyn
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-11
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 1317979761
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn 6 July 2005, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2012 summer Olympic Games to the city of London, opening a new chapter in Great Britain’s rich Olympic history. Despite the prospect of hosting the summer Games for the third time since Pierre de Coubertin’s 1894 revival of the Olympic movement, the historical roots of British Olympism have received limited scholarly attention. With the conclusion of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the passing of the baton to London, Rule Britannia remedies that oversight. This book uncovers Britain’s early Olympic involvement, revealing how the British public, media, and leading governmental officials were strongly opposed to international Olympic competition. It explores how the British Olympic Association focused on three main factors in the midst of widespread national opposition: it embraced early Olympian spectacles as a platform for maintaining a sporting union with Ireland, it fostered a greater sense of imperial identity with Britain’s white dominions, and it undertook an ambitious policy of athletic specialization designed to reverse the nation’s waning fortunes in international sport. This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport.
The British World and the Five Rings
Author: Erik Nielsen
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-02
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1317437616
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPrior to the outbreak of World War II, the British presided over the largest Empire in world history, a vast transoceanic and transcontinental realm of dominions, colonies, protectorates and mandates that covered over one-quarter of the world’s land mass and comprised a population of over 450-million subjects. Spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, over fifty modern nations—currently recognized by the International Olympic Committee—were governed and controlled by the British crown at some stage prior to the gradual dissolution of the Empire. The British World and the Five Rings seeks to explore the relationship between the former British Empire and the Olympic Movement. It pays due regard to the settler dominions, but it also addresses those territories who were less willing partners in the British imperial project. In doing so, the tendency of so-called ‘British World’ histories to promote an apologia for Empire is rejected in favour of a critical approach to imperialism. Combining thorough research with engaging and accessible writing, The British World and the Five Rings is applicable to many fields of Olympic scholarship making it a central work in the growing field of sports studies. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Irish Involvement in the Olympic Games 1896-1920
Author: John Kevin MacCarthy
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe involvement of the Irish in the early Olympic Games has not been accorded the historiographical attention of other Irish sporting activities of the time. Yet, early Irish Olympism has a store of potential research avenues, from local sources to international ones, which surpass what is available in almost any other facet of Irish sports history, including the records of the GAA itself. It is these sources which have been the platform of the research undertaken for this thesis over the past years and which, hopefully, provide a new insight into the Irish involvement in the Olympics prior to independence and the impact of that involvement on Irish identity and nationalism. The body of this thesis examines the impact of the various Olympic celebrations of the Olympic Games held from 1896 to 1920, with additional emphasis on the two most significant sets of Games, in St Louis (1904) and London (1908). The opening chapter sets out to place early Irish Olympic involvement, and its impact on Irish national identity, in various contexts. It is important to be aware, firstly, of the role played by national identity in the Olympic movement itself, in order to better understand how Irish involvement impacted upon the movement and vice versa. Furthermore, a glance at the way other non-independent states viewed international sport at the dawn of the modern Olympics, where Ireland{u2019}s most nationalistic sporting organisation was largely insular in focus and its international participation was sometimes unionist or certainly no more than moderately nationalist in origin.
Historicizing the Pan-American Games
Author: Bruce Kidd
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-19
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1315414279
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Pan-American Games, begun officially in 1951 in Buenos Aires and held in every region of the western hemisphere, have become one of the largest multi-sport games in the world. 6,132 athletes from 41 countries competed in 48 sports in the 2015 Games in Toronto, Canada. The Games are simultaneously an avenue for the spread of the Olympic Movement across the Americas, a stage for competing ideologies of Pan-American unity, and an occasion for host city infrastructural stimulus and economic development. And yet until this volume, the Games have never been studied as a single entity from a scholarly viewpoint. Historicizing the Pan-American Games presents 12 original articles on the Games. Topics range from the origins of the Games in the period between the world wars, to their urban, hemispheric and cultural legacies, to the policy implications of specific Games for international sport. The entire collection is set against the shifting economic, social, political, cultural, sporting and artistic contexts of the turbulent western hemisphere. Historicizing the Pan-American Games makes a significant contribution to the literature on major games, Olympic sport and sport in the western hemisphere. This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism
Author: Matthew P Llewellyn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-08-15
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 0252098773
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor decades, amateurism defined the ideals undergirding the Olympic movement. No more. Today's Games present athletes who enjoy open corporate sponsorship and unabashedly compete for lucrative commercial endorsements. Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves analyze how this astonishing transformation took place. Drawing on Olympic archives and a wealth of research across media, the authors examine how an elite--white, wealthy, often Anglo-Saxon--controlled and shaped an enormously powerful myth of amateurism. The myth assumed an air of naturalness that made it seem unassailable and, not incidentally, served those in power. Llewellyn and Gleaves trace professionalism's inroads into the Olympics from tragic figures like Jim Thorpe through the shamateur era of under-the-table cash and state-supported athletes. As they show, the increasing acceptability of professionals went hand-in-hand with the Games becoming a for-profit international spectacle. Yet the myth of amateurism's purity remained a potent force, influencing how people around the globe imagined and understood sport. Timely and vivid with details, The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism is the first book-length examination of the movement's foundational ideal.
The British World and the Five Rings
Author: Erik Nielsen
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-02
Total Pages: 135
ISBN-13: 1317437624
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPrior to the outbreak of World War II, the British presided over the largest Empire in world history, a vast transoceanic and transcontinental realm of dominions, colonies, protectorates and mandates that covered over one-quarter of the world’s land mass and comprised a population of over 450-million subjects. Spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, over fifty modern nations—currently recognized by the International Olympic Committee—were governed and controlled by the British crown at some stage prior to the gradual dissolution of the Empire. The British World and the Five Rings seeks to explore the relationship between the former British Empire and the Olympic Movement. It pays due regard to the settler dominions, but it also addresses those territories who were less willing partners in the British imperial project. In doing so, the tendency of so-called ‘British World’ histories to promote an apologia for Empire is rejected in favour of a critical approach to imperialism. Combining thorough research with engaging and accessible writing, The British World and the Five Rings is applicable to many fields of Olympic scholarship making it a central work in the growing field of sports studies. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Defending the American Way of Life
Author: Kevin B. Witherspoon
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2018-12-01
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 1682260763
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology. 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.
Titan of the Thames
Author: Sandy Nairne
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Published: 2024-02-08
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 1800182805
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWilliam Grenfell, Lord Desborough, was, for many, the epitome of the perfect English gentleman: an exceptional sportsman, a dedicated public servant and a devoted husband and father. Grenfell’s astounding sporting achievements, from climbing mountains to swimming the basin of the Niagara Falls twice, from rowing the English Channel and winning the Amateur Punting Championship for three years consecutively, to representing Great Britain in fencing, produced his deep-rooted belief in the importance of sport. It wasn’t surprising therefore that he became the driving force behind the 1908 London Olympic Games, an enormous success despite being staged with only two years’ notice. A surprisingly modern public figure, Grenfell was elected as an MP before going on to hold a prodigious array of local, national and international roles: mayor of Maidenhead, leading the London Chamber of Commerce, promoting aviation, establishing modern policing, and serving as chairman of the Thames Conservancy. Although Grenfell’s public life was successful, his family was struck by tragedy, aged six he lost his father and he and his wife Ettie suffered the loss of two sons in the First World War and their third in a motor accident. Despite this, their home, Taplow Court, was a place for entertaining and had been a focal point for the Souls, including notable politicians such as A. J. Balfour and the young Winston Churchill, as well as writers like H. G. Wells and Henry James. In Titan of the Thames, Nairne and Williams disentangle the myths surrounding this fascinating man who spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have pieced together a compelling biography of a figure whose story should have been told many years ago.
