ABSTRACT
A host of searches through various scholarly databases uncovered a solitary sport history title that included the words macrohistory or microhistory. The study of sport history has been largely concentrated on the study of organized, codified sport and therefore histories of sport from the post-1860 period have dominated. In many ways the historical study of sport has had a series of problems that have prevented the potentially fruitful methodologies of the macro and microhistorical approaches being applied. A bigger problem perhaps, than the potential intellectual scope of work in sport history, has been an obsession with facts, truth, and the elevation of the archive. With the tradition of empiricist study, governed by a focus on specific sports or nation states, sport history has largely failed to innovate. Sport history remains locked into a worldview from the 1970s, that empiricism is the way to do history.
