ABSTRACT
Sport history’s success rests on solid formal structures such as undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in institutions of higher education, book series published by university and commercial presses, long-running and emerging journals, and solvent professional associations. The field also benefits from an interest in the history of sport across the academy and the appearance of articles in virtually every discipline. Many historians of sport are committed to highlighting these political dimensions; some are dedicated to challenging them. Political aspects of sport appear throughout the Handbook in analyses of structures and relationships of power, socio-economic and political contextualization, and the incorporation of the voices of ordinary people, and particularly minority groups, into arguments and narratives. Emancipation from structures and relationships of power is an ethical value which is not always easy to uncover in modernist-inspired empirical-analytical history founded on objective, typically written, and verifiable sources.
