ABSTRACT
Sport history’s academic genealogy makes it no better or worse at this self-awareness than most other sub-disciplines. The endogenous historiographies are both essential to and a product of an enhanced systemic reflexivity and therefore lie at the core of sport history becoming its own object. In becoming its own object, sport history’s self-awareness turns on two subjects, both common to other forms of social and cultural history as structured social-cultural practice with a high degree of formalized organization. An assessment of the place of sports history in the wider field of American history prompted further ontological and historiographical consideration, although in a replay of the subject’s methodological nationalism this remained largely distinct from a parallel discussion in the UK. The absence of attention to failure with its consequent epistemological certainty may be seen also in sport history’s surety about the practices framed as sport in a tendency to treat them as consistent across cultural contexts.
