Andrew McGregor, PhD Candidate, Purdue University
Proposal Type
Working Group
Seeking
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
- Civic Engagement
- Place
- Memory
Abstract
Sports are an integral part of the college experience and dominate institutions’ public images. Mascots, fight songs, and game day traditions reflect the identity of cities, states, and regions and their citizens, highlighting larger histories of settlement, race, gender, politics, and more. Stadiums are sites of emotion and memory. Building off the successful working groups “Campus History as Public History” and “Public History and the Potential of Sports History Museums” at the 2016 Annual Meeting, this proposed working group endeavors to explore ways that sporting traditions frame campus history specifically, and regional identity more broadly. It explores sport as a form of public memory and history telling.
Seeking
This working group seeks to understand the ways that sporting traditions work as a form of public history, and unearth the types of stories that they contain. Sports have mass appeal and are a common topic of conversation. Fan hood is an important marker of identity. Boosters and booster universities promote athletic teams as regionals symbols (particularly in rural states). Sports symbols and narratives are embedded with deeper meanings and lingering memories. Within these conversations about sport and identity are hidden aspects of local, state, and regional history. The intimate connection of college sport to a sense of place and identity is ripe for richer exploration.
Extending conversations from last year’s conference, this working group hopes to bring together public historians working on college sport and campus history to find ways that they might work together. How might sport history benefit from a deeper understanding of campus events? How has sport media portrayed campus history? What has the impact of sport-related controversies been on campus? What might the history of college sport add to our understanding of race, gender, and sexuality on campus? What is the relationship between athletic conference and regionality? How do college mascots explain regional history and identity, the culture wars, etc.? What are the roots of mascots, school colors, fight songs, and other symbols? When and what was the context of their adoption? How and why has their display changed over time? What campus events are obscured by sport? To what extent are state and campus politics related to sport? Is sport success and campus construction linked?
Andrew McGregor brings his experience working in university archives as archivist and sport historian, writing institutional histories, and building online exhibits. This working group will present case statements on ways to connect campus history to sports history and sports history to campus history with the goal of understanding their shared space and spreading community and regional history to larger publics. The discussion will center on research and presentation strategies, sites for sharing this history, and ways to use sport to track collective pasts and chart collective futures. I welcome participants and suggestions for improving this proposal, particularly from people with experience working on campus history.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Andrew McGregor
If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.
All feedback, and offers of assistance, should be submitted by July 3, 2016.
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Discussion
2 comments
Comments are closed.
I think this group has great potential. I would suggest reaching out to the folks who participated in the working group on campus history at NCPH 2016: http://ncph.org/phc/ncph-working-groups/campus-history-as-public-history-2016-working-group/. As seen with recent sport scandals (Penn State, Baylor, Stanford, etc.), it helps to have non-sports scholars in discussion with sport scholars.
Another potential avenue could be to see how sports have informed (or failed to inform) ongoing debates over Confederate memorials. There’s certainly some connection at Ole Miss, but there must be others that NCPH folks could speak to.
There could also be a lot to say about campus halls of fame. From the few I know about, it seems they are mostly administered by Health, Kinesiology, or Sports Management programs (not usually trained public historians). Like many corporate museums, these halls of fame ignore unsavory aspects of their campus sporting past, or at least minimize the importance. This is obviously a problem the group could explore.
Andrew, this sounds like a great session. I don’t think any discussion of sports mascots is complete without a discussion of Native Americans as mascots and why that imagery is so persistent despite our awareness of why and how these images are damaging, not just for Native peoples but for others who absorb the stereotypes that the images represent. The NCAA ban on Native American sports mascots has been in effect for more than a decade, but many campus cultures continue to use those mascots “unofficially,” in chants and cheers. Many scholars are doing good work on this issue, including Richard King, and a faculty-led research group at Simon Fraser University just created a guide, “Think Before You Appropriate,” which describes what cultural appropriation is and why it matters. This group might not call themselves public historians, but they are practitioners in caring for material culture.
http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/resources/teaching-resources/think-before-you-appropriate/
Good luck!
Laurie