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Captures the sometimes outrageous, often humorous, and always bigger-than-life spirit of the World's Greatest Pitcher, Leroy Satchel Paige

This book began when the author met "the Satch" for the first time at the Twilight Zone Lounge of the Rhythm Lanes Bowling Alley in Kansas City. What started as a simple interview for Holiday magazine quickly grew into an animated conversation that lasted nearly a week as Paige and Fox moved from bar to club to restaurant to auto repair shop and from one topic to the next. Fox describes, with amazement, the reception the legendary baseball player received at Gates' Place, a famous barbecue restaurant, and The Flamingo, a big dance club. Over the course of the week, Paige shared stories about his start in the Negro leagues, his time with the Kansas City Monarchs, and barnstorming around the country, sleeping on the ground because there were no hotels for blacks. He also tells of his breakthrough to the big leagues when he signed with the Cleveland Indians and later pitched two shutouts against the Chicago White Sox.

In addition to his baseball career, Paige tells Fox about his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, catching fish during the Jubilee, throwing rocks at white boys, hustling bags at the train station, and working in the Depression era medicine shows. In contrast to these humble beginnings, Satchel recounts his later connections with film and music celebrities like Orson Welles, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holliday, and Cab Calloway. He also expounds on his friendships with other sports greats, including Goose Tatum, Meadowlark Lemon, and Sugar Ray Robinson.

The ironic intersections between oppression and fame, and between poverty and wealth, that emerge from Paige's narrative memoir exemplify the affliction of talent and genius in an era of racial discrimination and segregation.

Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City, edited by Terry Anne Scott, explores the vast and varied history of sports in this city where diversity and social progress are reflected in and reinforced by play. The work gathered here covers Seattle’s professional sports culture as well as many of the city’s lesser-known figures and sports milestones. Fresh, nuanced takes on the Seattle Mariners, Supersonics, and Seahawks are joined by essays on gay softball leagues, city court basketball, athletics in local Japanese American communities during the interwar years, ultimate, the fierce women of roller derby, and much more. Together, these essays create a vivid portrait of Seattle fans, who, in supporting their teams—often in rain, sometimes in the midst of seismic activity—check the country’s implicit racial bias by rallying behind outspoken local sporting heroes.

In the winter of 1892 the new instructor of physical training at Smith College, a diminutive young woman with a heavy accent, introduced her students to an adaptation of James Naismith's new game of Basket Ball. An immediate if unexpected success, the game spread to other women's schools across the country, and soon its founder, Senda Berenson (1868–1954), was called upon to codify its distinctive set of gender-specific rules. Emphasizing team passing and position over individual play, the version she instituted defined women's basketball for seventy years and eventually earned her the honor of being the first female elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Yet as Ralph Melnick points out, Berenson's pioneering role in the history of women's athletics was more a matter of accident than destiny. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, prone to ill health throughout her childhood, she enrolled in the Boston Normal School for Gymnastics in the fall of 1890 with the hope of strengthening herself so that she could pursue a career as a pianist, dancer, or painter. Instead she soon became both a practitioner and a proponent of a new approach to women's physical education, one aimed at providing a “natural outlet of the play instinct,” developing “endurance and physical courage” as well as “quickness of thought and action,” and promoting through teamwork the “power of organization” women needed to achieve full social equality. 

Extending her work into the factories and blighted urban tenements of America, Berenson later won the recognition of Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and other progressive reformers. Believing that “Americans have forgotten how to play,” she wanted to teach others to live “joyfully—beautifully.” For Berenson, the physical culture of exercise and games, played not for competition but for personal and social development as well as sheer enjoyment, was but another form of art. 

This convergence of athletics and aesthetics was hardly surprising, Melnick explains, because the single most important influence on Senda Berenson's life was her brother, the renowned art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson. The two siblings wrote frequently to each other over the course of their lives, and the author draws heavily on their correspondence throughout the book to create an intimate and insightful portrait of a remarkable American woman.

Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.

Dan Jenkins calls him “the greatest quarterback who ever lived, college or pro.” Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who played for TCU and the Washington Redskins, single-handedly revolutionized the game of football. While the pros still wore leather helmets and played the game more like rugby, Baugh’s ability to throw the ball with rifle-like accuracy made the forward pass a strategic weapon, not a desperation heave. Like Babe Ruth, who changed the very perception of how baseball is played, Slingin’ Sam transformed the notion of offense in football and how much yardage can be gained through the air. As the first modern quarterback, Baugh led the Redskins to five title games and two NFL championships, while leading the league in passing six times—a record that endures to this day—and in punting four times. In 1943, the triple-threat Baugh also scored a triple crown when he led the league in passing, punting, and interceptions.

Slingin’ Sam is the first major biography of this legendary quarterback, one of the first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Joe Holley traces the whole arc of Baugh’s life (1914–2008), from his small-town Texas roots to his college ball success as an All-American at TCU, his brief flirtation with professional baseball, and his stellar career with the Washington Redskins (1937–1952), as well as his later career coaching the New York Titans and Houston Oilers and ranching in West Texas. Through Holley’s vivid descriptions of close-fought games, Baugh comes alive both as the consummate all-around athlete who could play every minute of every game, on both offense and defense, and as an all-around good guy.

Chapters consider how the philosophical and theoretical understanding of the meaning of history influence a willingness to engage with digital history, and conceptualize the relationship between history making and the digital era. As the writers show, digital media's mostly untapped potential for studying the recent past via blogs, chat rooms, gambling sites, and the like forge a symbiosis between sports and the internet, and offer historians new vistas to explore and utilize.

Sport History in the Digital Era also shows how the best digital history goes beyond a static cache of curated documents. Instead, it becomes a truly public history that serves as a dynamic site of enquiry and discussion. In such places, scholars enter into a give-and-take with individuals while inviting the audience to grapple with, rather than passively absorb, the evidence being offered.

Timely and provocative, Sport History in the Digital Era affirms how the information revolution has transformed sport and sport history--and shows the road ahead.

Contributors include Douglas Booth, Mike Cronin, Martin Johnes, Matthew Klugman, Geoffery Z. Kohe, Tara Magdalinski, Fiona McLachlan, Bob Nicholson, Rebecca Olive, Gary Osmond, Murray G. Phillips, Stephen Robertson, Synthia Sydnor, Holly Thorpe, and Wayne Wilson.

What is the purpose of sport, and how are ethical conceptions of sport shaped by the answers to this question? In Sport and Moral Conflict, William Morgan investigates, examining sport as a moral crucible that puts athletes in competitive, emotionally charged situations where fairness and equality are contested alongside accomplishment.

Morgan looks at the modern Olympics—from 1906 Athens to 1924 Paris, when the Games reached international prestige — in order to highlight the debate about athletic excellence and the amateur-professional divide. Whereas the Americans emphasized winning, the Europeans valued a love of the game. Morgan argues that the existing moral theories of sport—formalism and broad internalism (aka interpretivism), which rely on rules and general principles—fall short when confronted with such a dispute as the transition from amateur to professional sport. As such, he develops a theory of conventionalism, in which the norms at work in athletic communities determine how players should ethically acquit themselves. Presenting his case for an ethical theory of sport, Morgan provides insights regarding the moral controversies and crises that persist today.

Across the modern political spectrum, left-wing and right-wing political theorists have invested sport with ideological significance. That significance, however, varies distinctively and characteristically with the ideology—a phenomenon John Hoberman terms "ideological differentiation." Taking this phenomenon as its point of departure, this provocative work interprets the major sport ideologies of the twentieth century as distinct expressions of political doctrine.

Hoberman argues that a political ideology's interpretation of sport is shaped in part by the value it assigns to work and play as modes of experience; the political anthropologies of right and left can be distinguished by examining their resistance to—or affinity for—sportive imagery of their leaders and of the state itself; there exists a fascist temperament that shows an affinity to athleticism and the sphere of the body that is not shared by the left.

Tracing modern sport ideology back to its premodern antecedents, Hoberman examines the interpretations of sport that have been promulgated by European political intellectuals, such as cultural conservatives and contemporary neo-Marxists, and by the official ideologists of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and China before and after Mao.

As a form of mass theater, sport can advertise any ideology. But the deeper relationship between sport and political ideology has never before been explored wth such vigor. Presenting the first general theory of sport and political ideology to appear in any language, Hoberman's groundbreaking work is a unique and invaluable contribution to the intellectual and political history of sport in the twentieth century.

2025 Anthology Award, North American Society for Sport History

The stories behind and legacies of important sports photos from the last 130 years.

Ever since photography and professional sports originated in the nineteenth century, photographers have shaped how we perceive sports. Sports through the Lens collects essays by twenty-five historians that consider what it means to capture and revisit a moment of cultural significance in sports, looking at each photo’s creation, its contexts, and how its meaning has shifted over time. Some essays provide fresh perspectives on such iconic images as Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston at their 1965 rematch and Michael Jordan soaring at the 1988 NBA All-Star Game slam dunk competition; others introduce readers to the lesser-known stories of the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon or the inaugural World Indigenous Games. The authors examine the photos' legacies alongside the artistry of both the athletes and the photographers. Reflecting on images of athletes from around the world engaged in sports from baseball to horse-racing to hockey, Sports through the Lens provides a wide-ranging meditation on the visual, historical, and cultural meaning of sports photographs.

From ancient Egyptian archery and medieval Japanese football to contemporary American baseball, every sport has been shaped by—and in turn has helped shape—the culture of which it is part. Yet as Allen Guttmann shows in this far-ranging study, for all their differences sports have followed a similar historical trajectory from traditional to modern forms. 

In Sports: The First Five Millennia, Guttmann traces this evolution across continents, cultures, and historical epochs to construct a single comprehensive narrative of the world's sports.

A delightful blend of memoir, opinion, and sports from an Alabama original.

For 31 years, Clyde Bolton wrote four sports columns per week for the Birmingham News. By his estimation, this makes him the most widely read Alabamian in history. He may be right.

In Stop the Presses (So I Can Get Off) he takes the reader along on a joyride through more than three decades of Alabama sports. Unsurprisingly, tales of Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan, Roll Tide and War Eagle, dominate, but at one point or another, Clyde covered just about every type of sporting event in the state. Personalities and events from the realms of high school sports, minor league baseball, college basketball, and Nextel Cup Racing are just some of the many facets of his personal and professional life that he shares in this, his 17th book.

In relating the outlines of his life, Bolton pays homage to his mentors, including famed sports editor Benny Marshall, and shares some insights he’s gained after a lifetime in the newspaper game. But throughout the book, he never forgets that any good journalist—any good writer—is in the business of telling stories. And oh, what stories!

Bolton writes of meeting Michael Jordan during the basketball star’s year with the Birmingham Barons; of having dinner with Muhammad Ali at the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house at Auburn University; of walking incognito down sunny Birmingham sidewalks with Hall-of-Famer Johnny Unitas. He explains why Bear Bryant, in his opinion, is the greatest football coach ever, tells of interviewing Joe Namath in the men’s bathroom, and reveals why his grandmother watched professional wrestling on her hands and knees on the floor in front of the television.

Stop the Presses (So I Can Get Off) is a joyous romp through the SEC, the Nextel Cup Circuit, and, in the end, life itself.

 

During the first half of the twentieth century, the introduction of cheap or free recreation to the workplace provided a metaphorical place where ordinary working-class people of all races and genders gained access to physical leisure and developed bonds of camaraderie in the anti-fascist labor movement. Strikes and Strikeouts: Sports and the Labor Movement in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States illustrates how this largely forgotten Labor Sports movement was critical in helping unions become forces for larger cultural change and essential to understanding the potency of the 1930-40s labor movement. Drawing from ten different labor and leftist social movement archives, Robinson strives to reconstruct the “people’s history." At its height, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the Labor Sports movement presented a real alternative to both apolitical and conservative sports and involved millions of working-class people. It was a key part of improving the lives of average Americans and helped build an anti-racist, anti-fascist, working class counterculture that helped change the United States through a strong labor movement. This movement brought higher living standards for working class people and the end of racial segregation in sports, which in turn aided the Civil Rights movement.

A compelling merger of biography and sports history, Surf and Rescue brings to light the forgotten figure whose novel way of seeing the beach sparked the imaginations of people around the world.