Sport and the British : a modern history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Sport and the British : a modern history
（Oxford studies in social history）
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1989
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Note
Bibliography: p. [369]-386
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Richard Holt has written a history of British sport since 1800 in which he attempts to explain how sport has changed and what it has meant to ordinary people. He argues that the way we play reflects not just our lives as citizens of a predominantly urban and industrial world, but also what is unique about British sport. How and why were the British unique in their sports? Holt tries to show that the British were innovators in abandoning traditional, often brutal, sports and in establishing a code of "fair play", which spread throughout the late Victorian Empire. He suggests that they were also pioneers in popular sports and in the promotion of organized commercial spectator events, with the accompanying rise of professionalism. The author also discusses modern media coverage of sport, gambling, violence and attitudes towards it, nationalism and the role of sport in sustaining male identity.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Old ways of playing: before the Victorians
- cruelty and sloth - the abolitionists
- field sports and the decline of paternalism
- survival and adaptation. Part 2 Amateurism and the Victorians: public schools
- the body in Victorian culture
- the age of the "gentleman amateur"
- female sport and suburbia. Part 3 Living in the city - working-class communities: rational recreation
- the life of the street
- spectating and civic pride
- gambling, animals and pub sports
- flight from the city? Part 4 Empire and nation: colonial elites
- the imperial idea and "native" sport
- dominion culture and the "mother country"
- Celtic nationalism - Ireland, Wales and Scotland
- Englishness and Britishness. Part 5 Commercialism and violence: shareholders and professionals
- press, television and profit
- hooligans.
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