ABSTRACT
As the United States moved into the twenty-first century, more of its residents played sports than ever before–many of them at far higher levels than in the past. While inequities continued to exist, many of the most obvious obstacles to athletic participation had been breached. Still, twentieth-century athletes, coaches, institutions, and communities continued to face a broad range of sports-related issues. The rewards that came with athletic success intensified pressures on youth sports. Colleges continued to struggle to balance athletics and academics–with many notable failures. Scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs plagued many sports, including cycling, the Olympics, and Major League Baseball. Startling new research on a brain disease known as CTE linked football concussions to permanent brain damage, raising serious issues for the nation’s most popular and most profitable sport. Sports also continued to offer telling windows into many facets of American culture, engaging issues that ranged from the nature of patriotism to the state of race relations to images of Native Americans to differences between men and women. It seemed increasingly impossible to understand this nation’s history, its present–or its future–without them.
