ABSTRACT
While the following list is not exhaustive, it is perhaps illustrative of the areas in which the historiography of sport has helped to illuminate what we know about sport, culture and society. The following are not in any order, rather they form the bulk of what have been key areas of investigation or topics or questions over the past ten or fifteen years. The historiography of sport is still being constructed and the areas listed below will not necessarily be the agendas of the future. On the other hand, any attempt to construct a synthesis of what we know about the contribution of sport to past and present cultures and society would have to acknowledge some or all of the following general bodies of sporting history or themes:
the roots of sport in ancient societies; sport in the middle ages; sport in colonial and post-colonial societies; women’s sporting experiences from at least the nineteenth century; nineteenth-and twentieth-century working-class sport; rich internal sporting histories of clubs or events; sport in the lives of different racial, ethnic and indigenous groups; the social formation and transformation of sport within the historiography of various
nations; sporting tradition and the making of heritage and mythology; post-sporting histories, such as post-modernism, post-colonialism and post-feminism; comparative and cross-cultural histories of sport and physical cultures; oral histories and biographies of sporting heroes and heroines.
