ABSTRACT
SPORT HISTORIANS PRESENT THEIR EVIDENCE of, and arguments about,thepast in different ways. These involve, inter alia, telling stories, comparing practices, establishing causes, contextualising events and theorising change. For many historians, the diversity of paradigms – combined with mixed techniques for gathering and interrogating sources and an array of themes that include race, class, gender, and national relations, cultural practices and identity1 – is proof of the discipline’s richness and creativity, its ability to adapt and accommodate fresh approaches and trends, and its development.2 Certainly new themes generate excitement, and even controversy, when they first appear with their novel questions about the past and the present. Yet fresh approaches have not fundamentally revised the epistemological foundations of sport history.
