Books in the Sport, History and Culture series

This book offers the first ever academic study of women's cricket in Britain from its origins in the 18th century to the present day. Through use of interviews with many former players, the book argues that women's cricket was a site of feminism across its history and an important source of empowerment to women who participated in the sport.

Explores the foundations of coaching and training practices and chronicles how traditional approaches to performance preparation evolved during the nineteenth century. This book was shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Prize 2013.

This book examines European football's development from a long-term transnational perspective, from 1905 to 1995. It offers a space for discussion between young and more experienced historians from different countries, leading to a better understanding of the turning points in the Europeanisation of the game.

In this edited volume, an international team of authors examines the development of football during the Second World War in a dozen European states. The volume concludes with essays on the representation of the topic in the arts and the media.

This book offers a unique examination of women's increasing involvement in sport during the period 1919-1939. Focusing primarily on sites of participation, it analyses where and how women accessed sport and their participation across class, age and marital groups. It also demonstrates the diverse ways in which sport was incorporated into women's everyday lives, with particular emphasis on the important and yet often neglected area of informal participation, so fundamental to understandings of women's sport. The unique combination of in-depth studies, drawing on the voices of the women themselves through oral testimonies, and the tracing of broad national and international trends, contributes to an innovative and comprehensive exploration of the evolution of women's sports participation across Britain during this significant period.

For the Koreans, no sport has surpassed football in terms of its popularity and national importance, from the Japanese colonization era onwards. However, its importance has developed over time as a result of unusual and agonizing historical events, including the tragic split between North and South Korea. This volume attempts to assess football's changing political and cultural place in Korea over the course of the twentieth century, from the Japanese colonial period via the Korean War to the end of the Cold War. It analyses the development and diffusion of football in North and South Korea from the following angles: nationalism and regionalism, internationalism and globalism, patronage, and the Korean style of play. It particularly concentrates on the social meanings of the North Korean miracle in the 1966 World Cup and of South Korea's success in the 2002 tournament. The author shows that football in Korea has not only reflected changes in Korean society but helped to shape those changes.

Bringing together boxing writers from different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, the book offers a vital and original contribution to the understanding of this enduringly fascinating and controversial sport. It does this be exploring and interrogating different aspects of boxing culture and associated concepts like masculinity and violence.

This book is a case study of an African-Caribbean-founded football club, Meadebrook Cavaliers, from the English East Midlands. Covering the years 1970 to 2010, it seeks to address the paucity of research on the British African-Caribbean male experience in leisure and sport as well as on the relationship between race and local-level football. The development of the club was intimately connected to wider changes in the social and sporting terrain. Based on a mix of archival and ethnographic research, the book examines the club's growth over four decades, exploring the attitudes, social realities and identity politics of its African-Caribbean membership and the varying demands and expectations of the wider black community. In doing so, it shows how studies of minority ethnic and local football clubs can shed light on the changing social identities and cultural dynamics of the communities that constitute them.