Sport in Europe: Politics, Class, Gender

As sport has grown, progressively replacing religion in its power to excite passion, provide emotional escape, and offer fraternal and sororital bonding, it has come to loom larger and larger in the lives of Europeans and others. It has become an inescapable reality linking public environment with intimate experience and thus offers the historian an opportunity to inspect and attempt to grasp all the dimensions of the recent past and their relative share in individual and collective experience. These essays consider the evolution of modern sport in Europe and examine its relationship with politics, gender and class.

Callum Brown is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow Adrian Harvey teaches Victorian history and literature at the Workers' Education Association Wojciech Liponski is a professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Tara Magdalinski is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Executive director of the Youth Studies Research Unit at Sunshine Coast University College, Queensland, Australia J.A. Mangan is a professor in the Faculty of Education, Strathclyde University and Director of its International Research Centre for Sport, Socialisation and Society Alethea Melling lectures in social history at the University of Central Lancashire, St Martin's University College, and Lancaster University Gertrud Pfister is Professor of Sport History and Sociology at the Free University, Berlin Teresa Ziolkowska is Professor of Physical Education, Physical Education Academy, Poznan