UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Sports
The First Five Millennia
Book Jacket: 'Sports' by A. Guttmann

Allen Guttmann

A lively cultural history of world sports from antiquity to the present

Winner of the 2005 Book Award of the North American Society for Sport History

From ancient Egyptian archery and medieval Japanese football to contemporary American baseball, every sport has been shaped by—and in turn has helped shape—the culture of which it is part. Yet as Allen Guttmann shows in this far-ranging study, for all their differences sports throughout the ages have exhibited many common characteristics. They have always been a domain for the cultivation of gender roles, for example, as well as for the enactment of class and ethnic identities. They have also followed a similar historical trajectory from traditional to modern forms.

Written in entertaining, accessible prose and illustrated with dozens of images, Sports: The First Five Millennia traces this evolution across continents, cultures, and historical epochs to present a single comprehensive narrative of the world's sports. Beginning with a discussion of what constitutes a sport—and what does not—he explores the vast variety of sports played by the preliterate peoples of the Americas and Africa, by the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, and in premodern China and Japan as well as in Islamic Asia and medieval Europe. These traditional sports include everything from Cherokee stickball and Chinese kite-flying to Persian wrestling and English bear-baiting.

Guttmann then turns his attention to modern sports, an invention of eighteenth-century England that spread throughout the world during the nineteenth century and became institutionalized during the twentieth. Marked by an adherence to codified rules and increasingly governed by international organizations such as the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Olympic Committee, modern sports have all but displaced their traditional antecedents throughout the world. The book concludes with a look at how skateboarding, hang gliding, and other "postmodern" sports have resisted the transition from spontaneous play to institutionalized contest, only to succumb in the end to the lure of modernization.

"Allen Guttmann has consistently produced works that are at the forefront of investigations of 'sport' as an immensely significant social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Sports: The First Five Millennia carries that tradition forward. With insight, thoroughness, and the remarkable range of knowledge for which he is well known, Guttmann has provided another excellent work. Of all the leading historians of sport in the world, I know of only one or two who might have come close to accomplishing what he has produced herein—and none who would have done so in such a readable manner."

Roberta J. Park, editor of From "Fair Sex" to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras
Allen Guttmann is “our most distinguished contemporary thinker on the nature and role of sport in society.”
A. Bartlett Giamatti, late president of Yale University,
Commissioner of Baseball, and author of Take Time
for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
"Allen Guttmann is one of the stars in the history of sports as a serious academic subject. His expert command of the theoretical controversies of his field inspires this fascinating and provocative book. . . . For sports fans, regardless of their political leanings, the great appeal of the book will surely lie in its treasure trove of sports information of all kinds. . . . True lovers of sports will learn from and enjoy the historical panorama presented in this unique book."
Thomas R. Martin, the History Book Club
"Guttmann makes a valiant, and for the most part, successful attempt to cover 5,000 years of sport in one book. . . . This is a valuable contribution to the literature. Highly recommended."
CHOICE

ALLEN GUTTMANN teaches at Amherst College. Among his many books on the history of sports are From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (1978), Women's Sports: A History (1991), Games and Empires (1994), and The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (2002).

Sports / American Studies
448 pp., 45 illus.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-470-1
January 2005

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