ABSTRACT
SPORT HISTORIANS HAVE NO DIFFICULTY recognising the content of theirfield. It includes any study of by-gone events, individuals, groups, practices and institutions with a sporting flavour. But ask historians of sport to formally define the objectives, assumptions, methods and forms of presentation of their field and they talk in vague terms about facts, narratives, context and theory. Ask them how their colleagues interpret the field and sport historians will likely refer to the prevailing themes of class, race and gender and their influence on the practice of sport in the past and present.1 In other cases, they avoid the question and describe the sources of their own esoteric research, whether it be the biography of a deceased sport star, the leisure tastes of working-class coalminers in mid-Victorian Northumberland, women’s intercollegiate basketball in the mid-West at the turn of the twentieth century, social changes experienced by Jewish-American sportswomen, or the culture of teenage Australian surfers in the 1960s. It is no surprise, therefore, that so many sport historians seem unsure of their field and its place in the discipline.
