Strong Boy

Strong Boy PDF Author: Christopher Klein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493001981
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
“I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the world.” So boasted John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world, a man who was the gold standard of American sport for more than a decade, and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. He had a big ego, big mouth, and bigger appetites. His womanizing, drunken escapades, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to a burgeoning newspaper industry. The larger-than-life boxer embodied the American Dream for late nineteenth-century immigrants as he rose from Boston’s Irish working class to become the most recognizable man in the nation. In the process, the “Boston Strong Boy” transformed boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today. Strong Boy tells the story of America’s first sports superstar, a self-made man who personified the power and excesses of the Gilded Age. Everywhere John L. Sullivan went, his fists backed up his bravado. Sullivan’s epic brawls, such as his 75-round bout against Jake Kilrain, and his cross-country barnstorming tour in which he literally challenged all of America to a fight are recounted in vivid detail, as are his battles outside the ring with a troubled marriage, wild weight and fitness fluctuations, and raging alcoholism. Strong Boy gives readers ringside seats to the colorful tale of one of the country’s first Irish-American heroes and the birth of the American sports media and the country’s celebrity obsession with athletes.

Strong Boy

Strong Boy PDF Author: Christopher Klein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493001981
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
“I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the world.” So boasted John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight boxing champion of the world, a man who was the gold standard of American sport for more than a decade, and the first athlete to earn more than a million dollars. He had a big ego, big mouth, and bigger appetites. His womanizing, drunken escapades, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to a burgeoning newspaper industry. The larger-than-life boxer embodied the American Dream for late nineteenth-century immigrants as he rose from Boston’s Irish working class to become the most recognizable man in the nation. In the process, the “Boston Strong Boy” transformed boxing from outlawed bare-knuckle fighting into the gloved spectacle we know today. Strong Boy tells the story of America’s first sports superstar, a self-made man who personified the power and excesses of the Gilded Age. Everywhere John L. Sullivan went, his fists backed up his bravado. Sullivan’s epic brawls, such as his 75-round bout against Jake Kilrain, and his cross-country barnstorming tour in which he literally challenged all of America to a fight are recounted in vivid detail, as are his battles outside the ring with a troubled marriage, wild weight and fitness fluctuations, and raging alcoholism. Strong Boy gives readers ringside seats to the colorful tale of one of the country’s first Irish-American heroes and the birth of the American sports media and the country’s celebrity obsession with athletes.

Boxing

Boxing PDF Author: Kasia Boddy
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861897022
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

The Manly Art

The Manly Art PDF Author: Elliott J. Gorn
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462525
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him—Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. P. Morgan'—and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy."—from the Afterword to the Updated EditionElliott J. Gorn's The Manly Art tells the story of boxing's origins and the sport's place in American culture. When first published in 1986, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other.This updated edition of Gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, gender, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation.

Japanese Counterculture

Japanese Counterculture PDF Author: Steven C. Ridgely
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816667527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Explores the significant impact of this countercultural figure of postwar Japan.

Champagne and Meatballs

Champagne and Meatballs PDF Author: Bert Whyte
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1926836081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Active for over 40 years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist Party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne and Meatballs--a memoir written not long before his death in Moscow in 1984--we meet a cigar-smoking rogue who was at least as happy at a pool hall as at a political meeting. His stories of bumming across Canada in the 1930s, of combat and comaraderie at the front lines in World War II, and of surviving as a dissident in troubled times make for compelling reading. The manuscript of Champagne and Meatballs was brought to light and edited by historian Larry Hannant, who has written a fascinating and thought-provoking introduction to the text. Brash, irreverent, informative, and entertaining, Whyte's tale is history and biography accompanied by a wink of his eye--the left one, of course.

The Gods of War

The Gods of War PDF Author: Springs Toledo
Publisher: Exposure Publishing
ISBN: 9780954392451
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In his long-awaited masterwork The Gods of War, award-winning essayist and boxing historian Springs Toledo tells the world that "the greatest of all time" is neither Muhammad Ali nor Sugar Ray Robinson. The greatest - the 'god of war' - is someone beyond their reach, a true anomaly of the ring. The evidence is compelling. See it and decide for yourself. This countdown of the top-ten fighters of the modern era is a literary experience like no other, and it isn't all readers will find in this book. Toledo's writing has been described as "warrior poetry"; he goes beyond the usual factoids, dry text, and threadbare yarns to conjure up legendary fighters as they were. Some of them will punch holes through the pages; others will touch your heart. Reading enthusiasts, sports fans, and boxing's critics are invited to take a new look at the sweet science. It's worth the price of admission.

When Old Technologies Were New

When Old Technologies Were New PDF Author: Carolyn Marvin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198021380
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In the history of electronic communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century holds a special place, for it was during this period that the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema were all invented. In When old Technologies Were New, Carolyn Marvin explores how two of these new inventions--the telephone and the electric light--were publicly envisioned at the end of the nineteenth century, as seen in specialized engineering journals and popular media. Marvin pays particular attention to the telephone, describing how it disrupted established social relations, unsettling customary ways of dividing the private person and family from the more public setting of the community. On the lighter side, she describes how people spoke louder when calling long distance, and how they worried about catching contagious diseases over the phone. A particularly powerful chapter deals with telephonic precursors of radio broadcasting--the "Telephone Herald" in New York and the "Telefon Hirmondo" of Hungary--and the conflict between the technological development of broadcasting and the attempt to impose a homogenous, ethnocentric variant of Anglo-Saxon culture on the public. While focusing on the way professionals in the electronics field tried to control the new media, Marvin also illuminates the broader social impact, presenting a wide-ranging, informative, and entertaining account of the early years of electronic media.

My Mamie Rose

My Mamie Rose PDF Author: Owen Kildare
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
"My Mamie Rose" by Owen Kildare. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Sporting Performances

Sporting Performances PDF Author: Shannon L. Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429560184
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Sporting Performances is the first anthology to tackle sports and physical culture from a performance perspective; it serves as an invitation and provocation for scholarly discourse on the connections between sports and physical culture, and theatre and performance. Through a series of intriguing case studies that blur the lines between the realms of politics, sports, physical culture, and performance, this book assumes that sporting performances, much like theatre, serve as barometers, mirrors, and refractors of the culture in which they are enmeshed. Some of the topics include nineteenth-century variety show pugilists, athletes on Broadway, sumo wrestlers, rhythmic gymnasts, and Strava enthusiasts. While analyzing sport through the lens of theatre and performance, this anthology reflects on how physical culture and sports contribute to identity formation and the effects of nuanced imprints of physical activity on the mind, soul, and tongue. Written primarily for those interested in physical fitness, sports, dance, and physical theatre, this interdisciplinary volume is a crucial tool for Performance and Theatre Studies students and those in the fields of Sports Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies more broadly.

The Killer Angels

The Killer Angels PDF Author: Michael Shaara
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679643249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “remarkable” (Ken Burns), “utterly absorbing” (Forbes) Civil War classic that inspired the film Gettysburg, with more than three million copies in print “My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the battleground for America’s destiny.