Tempering the Dichotomous Flame: Social History, Cultural History, and Postmodernism(s) in the Journal of Sport History, 1974–2014

Abstract

In the June 2014 issue of the Journal of American History, which includes a forum titled “State of the Field: Sports in American History,” Amy Bass argues that, as many humanities-based disciplines adopted tenets of cultural history, sport history did not. Based on over a decade of debate about social, cultural, and postmodernist paradigms, Bass’s assertion illuminates continuing historiographical arguments about epistemology and theory in sport history. In this article, I respond to these discussions by analyzing 405 full-length articles in the Journal of Sport History from the first issue in 1974 through the end of 2014. Drawing on philosopher R. Scott Kretchmar’s caution against “dualisms [and] dichotomies” in sport scholarship, I argue for a holistic understanding of sport history, rather than the dichotomous historiography present over the past decade.

The History of Physical Activity in the Past, Present, and Future of Kinesiology’s Big Questions, Hot Topics, and Prospects for Integration

“…The American College of Sports Medicine counts 50,000 members. Without getting mired in the contested terrain surrounding bibliometrics and impact factor utility and veracity, reviews of the quality of history of physical activity journals have been quite positive (Linden, 2016). As Phillips (2020) observed in his recent analysis, journals such as Sport in History, the Journal of Sport History, and the International Journal of the History of Sport rank in the top quartile of the cognate discipline publications.…”