ABSTRACT
In 1974, the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) published the first issue of the Journal of Sport History (JSH). In the first few years, editors made a conscious effort to bring together ideas about sport history, rather than simply historiographical debates about the academy. This chapter outlines a brief timeline of sport history scholarship and explains the beginnings of the JSH. Despite the limited scale of such work, these publications provided the academic impetus for the formation of NASSH and the establishment of the JSH. Academic recognition of the role of sport in the American experience took institutional form with the establishment of the NASSH. Methodological debates have existed since the launch of the JSH. Many of these have occurred outside of the journal; however, the scholarship in the JSH represents a mirror of the field and the ways in which scholars have engaged with questions of epistemologies and ontologies.
