ABSTRACT
Introduction In a 1983 historiographical essay, Melvin Adelman recalled writing a decade earlier about “scholarly developments in American sport history.” In Adelman’s recollection, writing that earlier essay had been “interesting but not . . . arduous” because at the time, “the number of scholarly works on this subject was quite limited.” In the intervening decade, Adelman had observed a “tremendous explosion in the number of studies on sport from different disciplinary perspectives.” Adelman celebrated this development as “one of many indicators of the progress made in the study of American sport history.”1
