Each year NASSH celebrates research and publications in sports history through the NASSH Book Prize. The Society makes two awards annually, for the best monograph and the best anthology. The scholarly historical study of sport resonates across the wider discipline and into cognate areas as the social, cultural, political, and economic significance of sport in recognized. This year’s short listed books engage with wider disciplinary and cross-disciplinary discussions to open up new and exciting areas of scholarship and to assert the importance of the everyday and the banal as potent historical forces. In celebrating the best of research in our field, we are marking work of considerable historical significance.
2023 Announcement
NASSH is pleased to announce those individuals who will deliver honor addresses at the 2023 conference in Washington, DC as well as the recipients of the NASSH Sport History and Social Justice Award.
Honor Addresses
Christine O’Bonsawin is delivering the John R. Betts Honor Address. O’Bonsawin took her Ph.D. from The University of Western Ontario and is currently an associate professor at the University of Victoria. A prolific scholar, she has published many articles and book chapters and given a plethora of research presentations dealing primarily with Olympic and Indigenous sport history. The title of her Betts Address is: “The Landscape of a Dream and of Dreaming: Olympic Ceremonies, (Un) Truths, and Indigenous Futurisms.”
Gary Osmond is delivering the Maxwell L. Howell and Reet Howell International Honor Address. Osmond took his Ph.D. from the University of Queensland and is currently an associate professor at the same institution. An extraordinarily productive scholar, he has published many articles, book chapters, and books on such topics as Indigenous sport history, digital history, visual representation, and material culture. The title of his Howell and Howell Address is: “Too Deadly-Tracking Sport Historians with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities.”
Danielle Peers is delivering the Seward C. Staley Honor Address. Peers took her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta and is currently an associate professor at the same institution. Possessing an extensive publication list, she has disseminated her research through articles and book chapters via an interconnection among critical disability studies, adapted physical activity, and sport sociology. The title of her Staley Address is: “From Eugenics to Paralympics: Empowering Trajectory or Supremacist Technology.”
NASSH Sport History and Social Justice Award
Kevin Blackistone, a graduate of Northwestern University, is a sports journalist who is currently the Shirley Povich Chair of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. A former reporter for The Boston Reporter and The Dallas Morning News, Blackistone is a frequent guest co-host on the Sports Reporters on Washington, DC’s ESPN 980, occasional panelist for ESPN’s Around the Horn, and a sports columnist for the Washington Post.
Christine Brennan, a graduate of Northwestern University, is an author and a sports columnist for USA Today and a commentator for CNN, ABC News, NPR, and PBS NewsHour. A former reporter for the Miami Herald and Washington Post, Brennan has written seven books, including the best-selling Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating. She has the distinction, among many other honors, of being the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media.
Damion Thomas, who took his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, is the museum curator of sports for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. A former professor at both the University of Illinois and University of Maryland, Thomas has an extensive list of publications dealing primarily with the interconnection among race, sport and American culture. His most notable publication is Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics.
Dave Zirin, a graduate of Macalester College, is the sports editor for The Nation and writes the well-known blog Edge of Sports. He has also been a guest on ESPN’s Outside the Lines and Democracy Now and has authored many notable books. Among those publications are What’s MyName Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States. Zirin very recently wrote and narrated the highly acclaimed film Behind the Shield: The Power and Politicsof the NFL.
2021 Prize Announcement
Monographs
We are honored to announce the winner of the NASSH Monographs Prize for 2021.For the NASSH Monographs Prize Committee 2021: Nancy Bouchier, Rita Liberti, Steve Reiss, Maureen Smith and Malcolm MacLean (Chair)
Janice Forsyth – Reclaiming Tom Longboat: Indigenous Self-Determination in Canadian Sport Recent ways of rethinking sport in colonial relations has opened up new discussions on Indigenous peoples sporting presence. In a relatively concise, engaging and lucid, 180 pages Forsyth builds on a history of a sports award to craft a three part analysis. The first is the history of an award for Indigenous athletes – the Tom Longboat Award created in 1951. The second is an analysis of Indigenous peoples in Canadian sport policy, including the various ways from Residential Schools through national fitness campaigns and elite sport promotion that those state-driven policies engaged, or failed to engage, Indigenous communities. The third is an exploration of an emerging site and form of cultural activism in self-determination politics as well as challenging the coloniality of sports’ governance and advocacy institutions. Forsyth’s analysis is matched by the views of a group of Award winners who concurrently celebrate the Award and problematize the official narrative producing a powerful sense of the Award as a site of colonial struggle and contested space and meanings. URL: https://uofrpress.ca/Books/R/Reclaiming-Tom-Longboat
Below in alphabetical order are those who were shortlisted along with the award winner.
Jonathan Finn – Beyond the Finish Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-finish Sports’ photo-finish with its twisted, elongated bodies suggests that the picture provides objective, incontrovertible accurate evidence of the result that is both an accurate measure and beyond the capacity of the eye to see. This presumption, its implications and origins lies at the heart of this exploration of this ubiquitous image. Finn is an historian of photography and brings to bear three sets of knowledge on this analysis: first, his grasp of both the technology and the semiotics of visual cultures; second, he draws on science and technology studies to consider the technologies of photography in the social, cultural, institutional and corporate contexts; third, he draws on philosophical discussions of objectivity to consider how notions of ways of knowing have shaped the development of the photo finish. In doing so unpacks important questions about the social significance and history of the photo finish, grounding discussions of the role of photography in depicting sport beyond those end-of-race moments and challenging us to look anew at what it means ‘to win’. Finn makes a significant contribution to sports history, studies of sport technology and philosophical analysis. URL: https://www.mqup.ca/beyond-the-finish-line-products-9780228003434.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto
Matthew Taylor – Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-45 Matt Taylor’s exploration of the place of sport in British wartime life bridges social and cultural history to deal with the what, the who, the how and the where as well as the why and the ‘what it meant’. Building on debates about wartime morale Taylor explores the institutional forms and sites of sports organisation to consider questions of the everyday, broadcasting and nationhood. He shows the importance of sport in the everyday lives of men and women, and highlights the difficulties most forms of organised sport had in maintaining their activities and the inconsistent policy responses alongside deep-seated class-linked decision-making. The rigour of the case, the breadth and depth of its reach, its attention to locality, a range of structural and cultural institutions as well as Taylor’s attention to evidential nuance and his consideration of both cultural and social questions makes this a major contribution to sport, social, and cultural history. URL: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-the-Home-Front-Wartime-Britain-at-Play-1939-45/Taylor/p/book/9780367229245
Anthologies
We are honored to announce the winner of the NASSH Monographs Prize for 2021.For the NASSH Anthologies Prize Committee 2021: Cat Ariail, Rita Liberti, Steve Reiss, Maureen Smith and Malcolm MacLean (Chair)
Robert Edelman and Christopher Young (eds) – The Whole World was Watching: Sport in the Cold War This collection delves into the question of soft power and develops alongside the habitual focus on the USA and USSR a much more internationalist and contextual frame of reference. There is also a valuable and powerful emphasis on non-state actors, even more so than the all-to-common focus on states and their proxies. The collection is notable for its focus on soft power, a view from the margins that disrupts the Washington-Moscow binary nexus, and a diverse set of authors producing consistently high quality work from within many of History’s subdisciplines. In particular there is some welcome attention paid to states on the edges of the Cold War’s principal blocs, highlighting the multiple ways the era’s tension played out. The result is a powerful collection of papers making good use of well-known and new source material, extending the view of the Cold War well beyond state-to-state relations within a bipolar frame. In doing so they should also inform a wider body of work to remind us of what we can learn from the breadth and complexity highlighted of these essays. URL: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31360
Below in alphabetical order are those who were shortlisted along with the award winner.
Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur & Gerard Akindes (eds) – Sports in Africa: Past and Present One of the paradoxes of histories of sport in Empire is how much attention we give to sport as a tool of imperialism and colonialism, and how narrow is our view. This collection, emerging from the growing body of work linked to an annual ‘Sport in Africa’ conference is a valuable addition to a body of literature that is beginning to see beyond its focus on South Africa and to a lesser extent the Mediterranean littoral. The collection explores identity markers, patterns of participation and various sports in their socio-political contexts, including heritage questions exploring the articulation of sports histories in the present as well as pedagogic questions looking at teaching African sports history. These papers amount to a significant expansion of readily accessible scholarly work. Together and individually these papers challenge many of the banalities and assumptions of sports history across significant part of the continent, in particular drawing out the ways sporting identities and sporting practices are fluid, constructed and in continual flux. In this they mount an important set of challenges to the ubiquity of colonial and racializing thinking and discourses. URL: https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Sports+in+Africa%2C+Past+and+Present
Heather L. Dichter (ed) – Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 Grounded in the emerging confluence of sport and diplomatic histories this collection expands both fields as well as football(soccer) studies through a focus on state-to-state relations, shifting beyond a broader sense of sport in international politics to highlight the fraught world of sport in inter-state relations. The diverse set of essays, covering a wide range of cases and periods, draws out strands in a field that is further complicated by dominance of centrality of non-state actors and private sector bodies that shape, govern and determine sport at both national and international levels. The independence of these actors is further complicated by the class associations of their leadership with various national, international and transnational elites. The essays explore the diverse ways the soccer-diplomacy relationship plays out in and through inter-state and non-state actor relations distinguishing soccer diplomacy from soccer as diplomacy. The collection shows the potential for thinking in frames supplied by studies of diplomacy about sport in international settings and highlights complexities of sport-diplomacy. URL: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813179513/soccer-diplomacy/
Antonio Sotomayor and César Torres (eds) – Olimpismo: The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean Reflecting the blend of colonialist and late capitalist outlooks, the relative weakness of scholarly sports history in Latin America as well as the relative marginalisation of small states, such as those of the Caribbean, in Olympic studies, this impressive collection of historically grounded multi-disciplinary inflected essays is a major contribution to sports history and Olympic studies. It opens up a region with a relatively low Olympic profile, looks well beyond the four yearly global event that is the summer games to include the key roles played by regional multisport competitions under the Olympic banner, and explores issues of nation and state building, elite social networks and ideology-in-practice. This diversity enriches a powerful collection and enhances its overall value not only to Latin American and Caribbean studies, but also to a wider understanding of sport in the region and to our understanding of the wider Olympic network and developments. This is a valuable collection with scholarly resonances well beyond its case studies and transnational emphases. URL: https://www.uapress.com/product/olimpismo/
2020 Monographs Announcement
We are honored to announce the winner for the monographs prize for 2020.
For the NASSH Monographs Prize Committee 2020: Cat Ariail, Adam Criblez, Steve Reiss, Maureen Smith, and Malcolm MacLean.
Kathleen Bachynski No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis (University of North Carolina Press) Kathleen Bachynski’s blending of health and sport history explores and opens up the difficult question of player injury and well-being in youth football. This is an impressive multi-stranded approach to doing history building on debates and developments in fields that should talk together more often. Furthermore, in focusing on youth and not professional football, and in taking a national perspective she enriches and extends discussions of American football, all the while grappling with a significant contemporary public health issue. Bachynski brings an understanding of the techniques of epidemiology together with social and business history and policy analysis to emphasize public health through and historical lens. As a social historian of sport she also brings skills and insights to her reading of the social forces – institutional, corporate, and cultural – that shape the identification of these issues and response in the wider sport cultural complex. In this she has given us a vital engagement with these questions of sport, health and injury, and taken the discipline into a pressing contemporary public health issue. (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653709/no-game-for-boys-to-play/)
Below, in alphabetical order, are those who were named to the short list along with our award winner.
Benjamin Sacks Cricket, Kirikiti and Imperialism in Samoa, 1879-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan) Ben Sacks traverses sport, imperial and national history in a way that in focusing on a small case challenges a dominant historiographical approach. Cricket in Samoa is distinct because alongside the ‘traditional’ game an indigenous variation, kirikiti, has developed and spread through the Samoan diaspora. Sacks explores the development of cricket within both colonial and Indigenous communities in the late 19th century alongside the transformation of the imperial game into kirikiti, a game grounded in fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way) built on the relations that shape and drive the Samoan world. This is a rich, multilayered history that treats its subject (both cricket/kirikiti and colonial Samoa) as diverse, nuanced and subtle, made more so by the multiple colonial regimes and Sacks’ skills at disaggregating both the colonial and Samoan worlds. It shows the rich potential of Pacific sport histories, an area the barely registers in the discipline. (https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030272678)
Jason P. Shurley, Jan Todd, and Terry Todd Strength Coaching in America: A History of the Innovation That Transformed Sports (University of Texas Press) In making the argument that the development of strength training is the key development in 20th century performance sport, Jason P. Shurley, Jan, and Terry Todd, two of whom were leading figures in the development of the field, bring to the analysis the power of critical insider analysis. They trace the shift in attitude from the perceived unhealthiness of excessive musculature to the rise of strength development through the rise of cultures of strength in and around sport. In doing so they explore changes in both the cultures of sport and strength as well as developments in medical and other scientific research highlighting both the rehabilitative and performance potential of muscle-building. This combined cultural and medical insight underpins a growing recognition of strength as a sport performance factor that grew into an institutionalised practice and field. In exploring the process of institutionalisation, this is a compelling, reflexive, multi-disciplinary history of the cultures of strength in sport that opens up wider debates and calls out for further collaborative analysis. (https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/shurley-todd-strength-coaching-in-america)
Derrick E. White Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (University of North Carolina Press) This well-crafted social history unpicks the reasons for the deep engagement with football in one very successful historically Black college and university (Florida A&M), and in doing so raises profound questions about the distinctiveness of football in, and of the social networks underpinning, HCBUs. White adapts a notion developed elsewhere in African American history, where ‘segregation produced the congregation’ built from and resulting in a coalition of groups and networks that sustained the community institutions of the oppressed and in doing so sustained their communities. He develops and extends this to a notion of the sporting congregation. Drawing on this notion he makes the case that while part of Florida A&M’s success lay in its success, a more important force was the sporting congregation around the school that incorporated most of the state’s African American community and others from the white elite. At the center of this congregation was Jake Gaither: adequate college footballer, outstanding college football coach. In doing so he has constructed a biography telling a historiographically disruptive and sophisticated wider story. (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469652443/blood-sweat-and-tears/)
2019 Anthologies Announcemen
I am grateful to my fellow assessors, Cat Ariail, Adam Criblez, Rita Liberti, and Jason Shurley, for the time and effort they have devoted to reviewing and evaluating a rich set of publications in the field. We are honored to announce the winner for the anthology prize for 2020.
Malcolm MacLean
For the NASSH Anthologies Prize Committee 2020: Cat Ariail, Adam Criblez, Rita Liberti, and Jason Shurley.
Barbara J Keys (ed) – The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press) This impressive collection of essays explores the early 21st century vision of sport’s moral effects, where it is seen as helping to build peace, combat discrimination, shore up and reinforce (or bring about) democracy, and enhance human rights. The contributors, representing a wide range of disciplines, invoke historical and sociological evidence, making this a rich trans-disciplinary collection. After highlighting four major themes – friendship, democracy, anti-discrimination, and peace, the second section focuses on human rights exploring organizations and their inter-relations with specific cases linked to mega-events in the last 40 years. The collection is built on two premises, that 1) the claims for sports’ moral influence is liturgical – that is, it is true because it is repeatedly asserted, and 2) there is little if any evidence to demonstrate sport’s moral and political effects as claimed in that liturgy. The authors investigate not the truthfulness of these claims but the reasons these claims are made and why they have power. (see https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15956.html)
Below, in alphabetical order, are those who were named to the short list along with our award winner.
Georgia Cervin and Claire Nicolas (eds) – Histories of Women’s Work in Global Sport: A Man’s World? (Palgrave Macmillan) This impressive set of essays is designed as an historiographical intervention. The authors, for the most part early career scholars, open up questions of women’s work in sport through a collection of sharp, often transnational, methodologically innovative, cross-disciplinary historical analyses demonstrating the extent of the field and working collaboratively in a field where evidence is often hard to find. Although predominantly European focused, the collection is internationalist in outlook including case studies exploring Côte d’Ivoire and Mexico, and with collective biographies drawing on evidence from beyond Europe. Many of the essays develop an intersectional analysis, retaining an emphasis on gender but taking account of class, ‘race’, location and other spatial factors to provide rich, nuanced interpretations and insights to a complex field. (see https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030269081)
Gerald R Gems & Gertrude Pfister (eds) – Touchdown: An American Obsession (Berkshire Publishing) In this important collection of essays many of the leading scholars of American Football explore its many aspects, presenting a state of the art analysis of the game in and beyond the USA. The substance of this significant collection focuses on the game as it is played, experienced, and followed in the USA: the American obsession. Along with this focus however, one third of the essays deal with Football’s global reach, looking at the game and versions of it in Canada, Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and through Pacific colonies and other zones of influence. The nineteen essays provide an insightful historically aware exploration of Football. This is a useful, accessible, and informative introduction to and analysis of the game with considerable pedagogic potential that should introduce scholarly analyses of the sport to wider audiences. (see https://www.berkshirepublishing.com/title/football-an-american-obsession/)
Robert J Lake (with Carol Osborne) (ed) – Routledge Handbook of Tennis: History, Culture and Politics (Routledge) As more than one of the contributors to this important overview of the state of tennis note, for a sport so widely played and so popularly supported, it has been the subject of a surprisingly small amount of scholarly research. Built around three principle groupings – historical approaches, cultures & representations, and politics and ‘social issues’ – the collection is a major contribution to scholarship of tennis, emphasizing historical and historically aware approaches. Alongside this awareness there is across the collection close attention paid to the continuity-change dialectic, grounding many of the most contemporary focused analyses in an historical outlook. In addition to this historical assessment the collection also has a strong sense of needs in the field, providing new important research findings, assessing the state of the art, and providing insights into research needs. (see https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Tennis-History-Culture-and-Politics-1st-Edition/Lake-Osborne/p/book/9781138691933)