Browsing by Subject "Sports history"

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Retrocession, partition and sporting communities in fractured societies : baseball in Taiwan and Gaelic games in Ireland, 1884-1968
(2011-12) Harney, John James; Li, Huaiyin; Chang, Yvonne; Hsu, Madeline Y.; Metzler, Mark; Oppenheim, Robert; Traphagan, John
This dissertation examines the roles of popular sports baseball and Gaelic Games in Taiwanese and Irish society respectively between the years 1884 and 1968. During this period, the spread of each sport in popularity and the subsequent increased profile in the public realm highlighted similar challenges faced by the societies of each territory as inhabitants of minor players in a global political system dominated by major powers. The development of Taiwanese baseball and its spread in popularity during the colonial period reveals the extent to which divisions between colonial Japanese and local Taiwanese blurred beyond the parameters of governmental efforts at coexistence and assimilation. Two teams in particular, the Nenggao team of 1924-25 and the KANO team of 1931, give evidence of a colonial Taiwanese sporting culture that featured strengthening connections with sporting culture in Japan. In both cases, baseball displayed potential as an integrating force in colonial Taiwanese society between social groups resident on the island rather than as a source for opposition to colonial rule. This is in direct contrast to Irish society, where the resurgence in popularity of Gaelic Games occurred within the political context of exclusivist nationalism. Gaelic Games existed as cultural markers of an Irish culture defined by a Gaelic ethnic identity and political commitment to an Irish nation state, choosing to ignore the realities of partition and the existence of a sizable Loyalist community in the north of the country. This viewpoint persisted until the late 1960s, when the eruption of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland irrevocably changed the terms of Irish political participation. At the same time, Taiwanese baseball transitioned from a shared cultural form between Taiwan and Japan to a potent avenue for emerging Taiwanese political voices in 1968 with the widely celebrated success of the Hongye schoolboy baseball team. Baseball’s popularity had persisted in the face of ambivalent attitudes among ruling Guomindang officials following retrocession, but the Hongye victory marked the introduction of specific political overtones to Taiwanese baseball, bringing an end to decades of the sport’s primary role as an act of public participation with limited political connotations.
"You've got to have tangibles to sell intangibles" : ideologies of the modern American stadium, 1948-1982
(2010-05) Lisle, Benjamin Dylan; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Davis, Janet; Hoelscher, Steven; Kackman, Michael; Todd, Janice
This dissertation investigates the modern American stadium from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, examining the ideologies that shaped these monumental buildings and the meanings people affixed to them. Stadiums were significant components of the modern landscape, frequently hosting massive audiences, costing tens of millions of public dollars, and uniquely symbolizing cities and their citizens’ civic spirit. Through interpretations of these stadiums’ architectural expression, spatial constitution, discursive construction, and visual representation, this study explores the ideological landscape of the modern United States, expands understandings of modern space, and examines what it meant to be “modern” throughout this period. A response to the old stadiums they replaced—largely masculine, inter-class, inter-racial, rambunctious places locked into run-down neighborhoods—new stadiums eliminated traditional and iconic sites of urban diversity, reconstituting sports spaces as modern, suburban, and technological. They re-gendered stadium space, integrating women into it as consumers and service workers. They re-classed stadium space, outfitting it with exclusive restaurants and private luxury boxes. They technologized stadium space, conspicuously loading it with exploding scoreboards and massive video screens. They re-racialized stadium space, relocating it from old ballparks adjacent dense African-American neighborhoods to open sites along freeways convenient to booming white suburbs or as anchors to clean-sweep downtown redevelopment. They fundamentally altered stadium experience, shifting emphasis from games on the field to entertainments and consumption opportunities around it. In doing all these things, modern stadiums materialized an ideological apparatus privileging a range of values and practices including gender distinction in mixed-gender settings, socio-economic and racial segregation, technological scientism, and consumption-oriented stimulation. Roy Hofheinz, the force behind the iconic Houston Astrodome’s planning and execution, fully understood the relationship of the material and the ideological; as he put it, “You’ve got to have tangibles to sell intangibles.” To illustrate these points, this dissertation engages postwar plans for futuristic new stadiums from designers like Norman Bel Geddes and Buckminster Fuller; the construction of new stadiums in the mid-1960s in New York, Houston, and St. Louis; and the increasingly routinized modern stadium of the 1970s—a controversial expression of modern progress for some, modern artificiality for others.