What is the purpose of history today, and how can sporting research help us understand the world around us? In this stimulating book, Nicholas Piercey constructs four new histories of early Dutch football, exploring urban change, club members, the media, and the diaries of Cornelis Johannes Karel van Aalst, a stadium director, to propose practical examples of how history can become an important democratic tool for the 21st century. Using early Dutch football as a field for experimental thinking about the past, the four histories offer new insights into the lives, interests and passions of those connected to the sport in the 1910s and the cities they lived in. How did the First World War impact on Dutch football? Were new stadia a form of social control? Is the spread of the beautiful game really a good thing? And why was one of the sport’s most prominent figures more concerned with potatoes? These stories of early Dutch football suggest how vital sport and history can be in shaping our lives, perceptions and actions, and why we need to challenge the influence they have today. This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here(.xlsx).

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability—how we imagine better urban environments—remain persistently relevant and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organization. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city—Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital—Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic "algorithm." The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter, and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the "model city" enduring a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other "Venices" for the future.

Today we’re just as, if not more, likely to scroll, click, and tap the cold, shiny screen of a laptop, tablet, or smartphone as we are to turn the pages of a book. How has the advent of new technologies changed the way we read? Do our devices encourage quick and cursory reading? Is the experience of reading becoming “flatter” alongside the devices themselves? How have our conceptions changed of what reading is?
           
With Reading Today, Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola have assembled contributions that respond to these questions and many more. The contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading. They consider, for example, how paying attention to our emotional reactions while reading can significantly affect how we experience the process. Other chapters consider the impacts of technology on reading through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel, and the healing power of books.