Early British Swimming, 55 BC-AD 1719

Early British Swimming, 55 BC-AD 1719 PDF Author: Nicholas Orme
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 9780859891349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In 1857 Everard Digby published the first scientific treatise on swimming - and one of the first on any modern sport. Nicholas Orme rehabilitates Digby as a pioneer of the history of sport. The book opens with a history of swimming in Britain from the Romans to the sixteenth century, which is followed by an account of Digby's life and work.

Early British Swimming, 55 BC-AD 1719

Early British Swimming, 55 BC-AD 1719 PDF Author: Nicholas Orme
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 9780859891349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In 1857 Everard Digby published the first scientific treatise on swimming - and one of the first on any modern sport. Nicholas Orme rehabilitates Digby as a pioneer of the history of sport. The book opens with a history of swimming in Britain from the Romans to the sixteenth century, which is followed by an account of Digby's life and work.

Shifting Currents

Shifting Currents PDF Author: Karen Eva Carr
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789145775
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A deep dive into the history of aquatics that exposes centuries-old tensions of race, gender, and power at the root of many contemporary swimming controversies. Shifting Currents is an original and comprehensive history of swimming. It examines the tension that arose when non-swimming northerners met African and Southeast Asian swimmers. Using archaeological, textual, and art-historical sources, Karen Eva Carr shows how the water simultaneously attracted and repelled these northerners—swimming seemed uncanny, related to witchcraft and sin. Europeans used Africans’ and Native Americans’ swimming skills to justify enslaving them, but northerners also wanted to claim water’s power for themselves. They imagined that swimming would bring them health and demonstrate their scientific modernity. As Carr reveals, this unresolved tension still sexualizes women’s swimming and marginalizes Black and Indigenous swimmers today. Thus, the history of swimming offers a new lens through which to gain a clearer view of race, gender, and power on a centuries-long scale.

Splash!

Splash! PDF Author: Howard Means
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306845644
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Choose a stroke and get paddling through the human history of swimming! From man's first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the splashing, sparkling pool party in your backyard, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all--the heroes and the ordinary folk; the real and the mythic. Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then reemerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at today's Olympic games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about moving through water, about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, and shows you how much more it can be. Its history offers a multi-tiered tour through religion, fashion, architecture, sanitation and public health, colonialism, segregation and integration, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory, and much, much more. Unique and compelling, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history--and just like jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, it has fun along the way.

A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800 – 1918

A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800 – 1918 PDF Author: Christopher Love
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317970284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Covering a time of great social and technological change, this history traces the development of the four classic aquatic disciplines of competitive swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and water polo, with its main focus on racing. Working from the beginnings of municipal recreational swimming, the book fully explores the links between swimming and other aspects of English life society including class, education, gender, municipal governance, sexuality and the Victorian invention of the sports amateur-professional divide. Uniquely focused on swimming -often neglected in analytic sports histories- this is the first study of its kind and will be an important landmark in the establishment of swimming history as a topic of scholarly investigation. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

British Sporting Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century

British Sporting Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Sharon Harrow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131717142X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Sport as it is largely understood today was invented during the long eighteenth century when the modern rules of sport were codified; sport emerged as a business, a spectacle, and a performance; and gaming organized itself around sporting culture. Examining the underexplored intersection of sport, literature, and culture, this collection situates sport within multiple contexts, including religion, labor, leisure time, politics, nationalism, gender, play, and science. A poetics, literature, and culture of sport swelled during the era, influencing artists such as John Collett and writers including Lord Byron, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding. This volume brings together literary scholars and historians of sport to demonstrate the ubiquity of sport to eighteenth-century life, the variety of literary and cultural representations of sporting experiences, and the evolution of sport from rural pastimes to organized, regular events of national and international importance. Each essay offers in-depth readings of both material practices and representations of sport as they relate to, among other subjects, recreational sports, the Cotswold games, clothing, women archers, tennis, celebrity athletes, and the theatricality of boxing. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer valuable multiple perspectives on reading sport during the century when sport became modern.

Sting

Sting PDF Author: Paul Carr
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238894
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Gordon Sumner was born in a mainly working-class area of North Tyneside, England, in 1951. Decades later, we would come to know him as Sting, one of the world’s best-selling music artists. Sting was the lead singer of the Police from 1977 to 1984 before launching a hugely successful solo career. In Sting:From Northern Skies to Fields of Gold, popular music scholar Paul Carr argues that the foundations of Sting’s creativity and drive for success were established by his birthplace, with vestiges of his “Northern Englishness” continuing to emerge in his music long after he left his hometown. Carr frames Sting’s creative impetus and output against the real, imagined, and idealized places he has occupied. Focusing on the sometimes-blurry borderlines between nostalgia, facts, imagination, and memories—as told by Sting, the people who knew (and know) him, and those who have written about him—Carr investigates the often complex resonance between local boy Gordon Sumner and the star the world knows as Sting. Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the definitive line-up of the Police, this is the first book to examine the relationship between Sting’s working class background in Newcastle, the life he has consequently lived, and the creativity and inspiration behind his music.

Navigating African Maritime History

Navigating African Maritime History PDF Author: Carina E. Ray
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786948958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book is a collection of essays addressing multiple aspects of African maritime history in attempt to counter the lack of academic research that exists in comparison to other nations and continents, and to assert the value of African topics to the global study of maritime history. Each essay addresses African maritime history whilst also demonstrating an inextricable link to the global maritime stage. The topics discussed include early human migration to Africa; early European contact with Africa; the role of West African maritime communities in the Atlantic slave trade; New World slaveholders and the exploitation of African maritime skillsets; the construction of Atlantic world racial discourses; the rise and fall of colonial rule; and African immigrant communities in Europe. These essays cover maritime topics such as seafaring labour, navigational technology, swimming, diving, surfing; plus political subjects that include colonisation, decolonisation, immigration and citizenship. The book consists of eight essays and an introduction that evaluates the existing research into African maritime history. It includes case studies from every major geographical part of the continent, bar North Africa, and covers the Early Modern period up to the twentieth century. The purpose is not to provide a comprehensive chronological history, but rather a diverse collection of topics across a range of periods and locations to reflect the wealth of maritime topics in the history of Africa and their global significance. It concludes with a call for further research into non-European maritime activity, to deepen the global historiography.

Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water

Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water PDF Author: Vicki Valosik
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324093056
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history of how women found synchronicity—and power—in water. “If you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim ‘pretty,’?” said a young Esther Williams to theater impresario Billy Rose. Since the nineteenth century, tensions between beauty and strength, aesthetics and athleticism have both impeded and propelled the careers of female swimmers—none more so than synchronized swimmers, for whom Williams is often considered godmother. In this revelatory history, Vicki Valosik traces a century of aquatic performance, from vaudeville to the Olympic arena, and brings to life the colorful cast of characters whose “pretty swimming” not only laid the groundwork for an altogether new sport but forever changed women’s relationships with water. Williams, who became a Hollywood sensation for her splashy “aquamusicals,” was just one in a long, bedazzled line of swimmers who began their careers as athletes but found greater opportunity, and often social acceptance, in the world of show business. Early starlets like Lurline the Water Queen performed “scientific” swimming, a set of moves previously only practiced by men—including Benjamin Franklin—that focused on form and exhibited mastery in the water. Demonstrating their fancy feats in aquariums and water tanks rolled onto music hall stages, these women stunned Victorian audiences with their physical dexterity and defied society’s rigid expectations of what was proper and possible for their sex. Far more than bathing beauties, they ushered in sensible swimwear and influenced lifesaving and physical education programs, helping to drop national drowning rates and paving the way for new generations of female athletes. When a Chicago physical educator matched their aquatic movements to music in the 1920s, young girls flocked to take part in “synchronized swimming.” But despite overwhelming love from audiences and the Olympic ambitions of its practitioners, “synchro” was long perceived as little more than entertaining pageantry, and its athletes would face a battle against the current to earn a spot at the highest echelons of sport. Now, on the fortieth anniversary of synchronized swimming’s elevation to Olympic status, Swimming Pretty honors its incredible history of grit, glamor, and sheer athleticism.

British Sport

British Sport PDF Author: Richard William Cox
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714652504
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Volume three of a bibliography documenting all that has been written in the English language on the history of sport and physical education in Britain. It lists all secondary source material including reference works, in a classified order to meet the needs of the sports historian.

Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920

Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920 PDF Author: Deborah Simonton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315522799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.