The Athletic Crusade
The Athletic Crusade

Author: Gerald R. Gems

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0803222165

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The Athletic Crusade is the first book to systematically analyze the role of sports in the expansion of U.S. empire from the 1890s through World War II. Gerald R. Gems details how white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males set the standard for inclusion within American society, transferred that standard to foreign territories, and subtly used American sports to instill allegedly desirable racial, moral, and commercial virtues in colonial subjects. In the realm of such expansion, sports provided a less harsh, less militaristic means of instilling belief in a dominant system?s values and principles than more overt methods such as war. The process of change, however, had unexpected consequences as subordinate groups adapted or even rejected American overtures. Sport became a means for nonwhites to challenge whiteness, Social Darwinism, and cultural hegemony by establishing their own physical prowess, claiming a measure of esteem, and creating a greater sense of national identity. Gems shows the direct influence of sports in Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic and explores their comparatively minimal influence in countries such as China and Japan. Amid increasing globalization, The Athletic Crusade offers a welcome perspective on how the United States has attempted to spread its influence in the past and the implications for the future of indigenous and other societies.

The Caped Crusade
The Caped Crusade

Author: Glen Weldon

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1476756732

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"Since his debut in Detective Comics #27, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop Art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim ninja of the urban night. Yet, despite these endless transformations, he remains one of our most revered cultural icons. [In this book, Weldon provides a] look at the cultural history of Batman and his fandom"--Amazon.com.

The Children's Crusade
The Children's Crusade

Author: Ann Packer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-04-07

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1476710473

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From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a “tour de force family drama” (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of his future family, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and undersatisfied, chafing at the conventions confining her. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence sets off a struggle over the family’s future. One by one, they tell their stories, which reveal Packer’s “great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family” (MORE Magazine). Reviewers have praised Ann Packer’s “brilliant ear for character” (The New York Times Book Review) and her “naturalist’s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented” (The New Yorker). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children’s Crusade, “an absorbing novel that celebrates family even as it catalogs its damages” (People, Book of the Week). This is a “superb storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle), Ann Packer’s most deeply affecting book yet, “tragic and utterly engrossing” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

The Boys' Crusade
The Boys' Crusade

Author: Paul Fussell

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 2005-09-13

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0812974883

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The Boys’ Crusade is the great historian Paul Fussell’s unflinching and unforgettable account of the American infantryman’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Based in part on the author’s own experiences, it provides a stirring narrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of view of the children—for children they were—who fought it. While dealing definitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, and tactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veil of feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war’s brutal essence. “A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth,” Fussell writes in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind of sentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and human emotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows of war, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, and resentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature on World War II, The Boys’ Crusade stands wholly apart. Fussell’s profoundly honest portrayal of these boy soldiers underscores their bravery even as it deepens our awareness of their experiences. This book is both a tribute to their noble service and a valuable lesson for future generations.

Game Changer
Game Changer

Author: PE4Life

Publisher: Human Kinetics

Published: 2011-08-12

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 149258245X

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Engaging and inspiring, Game Changer: Phil Lawler’s Crusade to Help Children by Improving Physical Education charts Lawler’s tireless mission to refocus physical education to a wellness-based model that encourages fitness for a lifetime. Game Changer captures the passion of this legend in the field of physical education who believed that every child—regardless of athletic ability—should be given a chance to find an activity he or she can embrace and enjoy for a lifetime. The renowned Dr. Kenneth Cooper of Cooper Aerobics Center names Phil Lawler the "Father of the New PE." Game Changer offers an inspiring glimpse at the life of Lawler and his “New PE,” the wellness-based approach to physical education that has energized a revolution in the world of education. Full of ideas and strategies, Game Changer provides both the information and motivation to develop, implement, and support PE and community programs that encompass all children, not just the athletically inclined. Messages from leaders in the physical education field provide lessons learned in the development, leadership, promotion, and ongoing advocacy of wellness-based PE programs. Game Changer takes readers through Lawler’s beginnings as a stereotypical PE teacher and coach and his dawning realization of how physical education class can be a positive tool for encouraging a lifetime of health and physical activity. As Lawler’s work received a boost from the mounting research connecting physical activity to academic and behavioral improvements, the New PE gained momentum nationally and abroad. Readers will be inspired by Lawler’s vision and commitment, despite his own health challenges, to improving the health and fitness of children worldwide. Though his battle with cancer cut short his own work, Game Changer carries the torch of Lawler’s New PE by providing information and tools to assist physical educators in developing more inclusive PE programs that emphasize developing, attaining, and renewing personal fitness goals across the life span.

Playing with the Big Boys
Playing with the Big Boys

Author: Lou Antolihao

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2015-05

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0803278519

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Basketball has a lock on the Filipino soul. From big arenas in Manila to makeshift hoops in small villages, basketball is played by Filipinos of all walks of life and is used to mark everything from summer breaks for students to religious festivals and many other occasions. Playing with the Big Boys traces the social history of basketball in the Philippines from an educational and "civilizing" tool in the early twentieth century to its status as national pastime since the country gained independence after World War II. While the phrase "playing with the big boys" describes the challenge of playing basketball against outsized opponents, it also describes the struggle for recognition that the Philippines, as a subaltern society, has had to contend with in its larger transnational relationships as a former U.S. colony. Lou Antolihao goes beyond the empire-colony dichotomy by covering Filipino basketball in a wider range of comparisons, such as that involving the growing influence of Asia in its region, particularly China and Japan. In this context, Antolihao shows how Philippines basketball has moved from a vehicle for Americanization to a force for globalization in which the United States, while still a key player, is challenged by other basketball-playing countries.

Mapping an Empire of American Sport
Mapping an Empire of American Sport

Author: Mark Dyreson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 1317980352

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Since the mid-nineteenth century, the United States has used sport as a vehicle for spreading its influence and extending its power, especially in the Western Hemisphere and around the Pacific Rim, but also in every corner of the rest of the world. Through modern sport in general, and through American pastimes such as baseball, basketball and the American variant of football in particular, the U.S. has sought to Americanize the globe’s masses in a long series of both domestic and foreign campaigns. Sport played roles in American programs of cultural, economic, and political expansion. Sport also contributed to American efforts to assimilate immigrant populations. Even in American games such as baseball and football, sport has also served as an agent of resistance to American imperial designs among the nations of the Western hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. As the twenty-first century begins, sport continues to shape American visions of a global empire as well as framing resistance to American imperial designs. Mapping an Empire of American Sport chronicles the dynamic tensions in the role of sport as an element in both the expansion of and the resistance to American power, and in sport’s dual role as an instrument for assimilation and adaptation. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Power and Global Sport
Power and Global Sport

Author: Joseph Maguire

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1134527284

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Sport has changed. Traditions and territorial distinctions are dissolving as a result of new global, political, economic and cultural conditions. The team of authors examine these changes, investigating the power relations that govern the new global sport and assessing the consequences for the future of sport. The book is founded on a series of case studies, linked by a common process-sociological approach, and is divided into four sections - each dealing with an important aspect of sport and globalization: * the local-global nexus - how global sports processes are played out at the level of local communities * lived experiences - the reality of global sport for players and supporters * identity politics - the impact of global sport on national consciousness * sporting futures - the emergent political, economic and cultural forces that are shaping global sport, and their implications for its development. The text introduces new approaches to the study of sport and globalization, updating and extending Maguire's previous work, and is therefore an essential resource for all those working in this fast-changing area.