Historians in the News Roundup

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Melody Burri, "Historian Nancy Hewitt to present new work on Quaker Amy Post," MPNnow, August 22, 2012

Farmington, N.Y. - Nancy A. Hewitt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, will give the fourth talk in the summer series for the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum.>>>

Professor Hewitt will present "Faith and Politics: The Spiritual Journeys of Amy Post."

Edward Helmore, "UK Harvard star Niall Ferguson accused of intellectual fraud," The Week, August 22, 2012

 THE British-born journalist and Harvard-tenured historian Niall Ferguson has landed himself in a nasty spat with some of America's most distinguished economists, among them Princeton's Nobel Prize-winner - and venerable New York Times columnist - Paul Krugman.

Ferguson is a promoter of Chancellor George Osborne's cut-to-growth economic philosophy. Krugman is a spend-to-grow man, as is President Obama.>>>

An interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his essay "There is No One California," Forum, KQED, August 20, 2012

California has become a target of mockery in the presidential campaign, with GOP challenger Mitt Romney holding the troubled state up as an example of where the country is headed under Barack Obama. Historian and conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson also slams the state in a recent article entitled, "There is No One California." He joins us to talk about the piece, and to give us his take on the presidential campaign.>>>

Rebekah Higgitt, "(Pseudo)scientific history?" Guardian blog, August 16, 2012

There have been many writers who have claimed that history can be, or should be, scientific. Different things are meant by this, of course, and such statements are provoked by different motivations, although generally they trade on the perceived successes, rewards, professionalism and certainty of the sciences.>>>

"Historian Taylor Branch Critiques College Sports," Only a Game, WBUR (rebroadcast), August 25, 2012

The NCAA is facing growing scrutiny from college athletes, coaches and the people who follow college sports. The September 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch — author of Parting the Waters, The Clinton Tapes, and others — entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which criticizes the corruption within the NCAA.>>>

Rewriting History? The Case of Joe Paterno

Alan Bliss

As part of its sanctions against Penn State University, the NCAA last week "vacated" 111 of the Nittany Lions' football victories under their late coach, Joe Paterno. The order changes the official record of Penn State's teams from 1998 to 2011. Technically, then, Coach Paterno no longer holds the NCAA record as the winningest coach in Division I college football.

A non-academic friend, a lawyer by profession, complains that the NCAA is rewriting history. Professional historians like me, my friend argues, should be outraged. Surprisingly, my friend is hardly alone in reading this news as an intolerable assault on historical truth. In the July 24 New York Times, Northwestern University sociologist Gary Alan Fine published an op-ed ("George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.") objecting to the NCAA's records sanction against Penn State:

Professor Fine sees this as a disturbing attempt to re-write the past, or to create a false, "fantasized," history. "George Orwell would be amused," Fine believes. But neither Fine nor others who make this argument seem to be historians, who, as far as I know, are unconcerned by the NCAA's periodic fiddling with its own record books. One reason is that retroactive bookkeeping does little to alter any "history" other than the records of the institution doing the counting. And mind, we are talking here about Division I collegiate football, where even indisputable facts are disputed endlessly. Even if that weren't so, sports historians take pains to explicate the circumstances of athletic records. Future researchers looking up the Lions' football stats will be obliged to learn all about the University's miserable scandal. The NCAA's purpose in sanctioning Penn State will be lastingly served.

As I teach my students, the past is what happened, while history is how we explain and interpret the past. Denying or obscuring inconvenient facts throws historians off at times, and can indeed rise to the level of the Orwellian. But in the long run the practice often fails. For example, we now know that Woods Hole Oceanographer Bob Ballard was not really engaged in a pure-science project to locate the wreck of the RMS Titanic. His 1985 expedition was financed by the U.S. Defense Dept., which sought his technology to examine the deep-sea wrecks of its two lost Cold-war era nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. After obliging the Navy, Dr. Ballard carried out his "cover" mission of locating the Titanic. The success of that side-trip made Ballard an inspirational hero on the order of a winning college football coach. Among his many admirers, the new facts haven't seriously knocked him off his pedestal - they just complicate his story and that of the Titanic's rediscovery.

Historians understand better than most how little we sometimes know. We are alert to the risks that go with formulating historical understanding from data. Numbers can lie, whether they involve college football or voting. I teach students to be skeptical, critical, and open to new ideas, new sources, new data, and new interpretations of the evidence of the past. Some ideologues disdain that as "historical revisionism." But history is endlessly under revision, and we shouldn't want it any other way.

Joe Paterno was a hero. He will always hold a place in history, though the context is different now. The truth about his and Penn State's football program has badly dented his legacy. The NCAA's action on his win-loss record can't hurt the late Coach, whose troubles are over. No doubt, his family and partisans will grieve about this poisonous affair for the rest of their lives. Mainly, Penn State's vacated wins are a message to other coaches, players, administrators, fans, boosters, and just regular onlookers. The sanctions also help show that history has an annoying habit, which historians encourage, of outting lies.

Alan Bliss is a historian of the modern U.S. His research is on metropolitan political economy, especially in Sunbelt cities. He is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Florida.

College football has changed over time. And it hasn’t.

Chris Beneke
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With Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno’s dismissal amid the sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed Happy Valley, college football is under scrutiny again. So too are the huge sums of money that sustain this monumental sports and media enterprise. Paterno will be paid a little over $1 million from Penn State this year. That is actually modest by comparison with his peers; in 2010, University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban received over $6 million in compensation. Paterno’s salary and celebrity stand out only in contrast with everyone else—his players for instance, as well the faculty who teach them. For good reason then, the head football coach’s salary is often treated as an index of the distance a college has departed from its core academic commitments (we’re still awaiting the first news van to be overturned in ousted PSU President Graham Spanier’s name), not to mention its ethical standards.

What is the history that got us here?

In his book Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, historian Michael Oriard contends that the big change in college football occurred in the early 1970s. Until then, head coaches were paid much like deans or upper-tier professors. Moreover, many held tenured faculty positions. They were themselves part of the faculty. But with “the NCAA’s transformation of student-athletes into athlete-students in 1972 and 1973—making freshman eligible, dropping the 1.6 rule [which stipulated that a college could only offer you a scholarship if you were projected to receive at least a 1.6 GPA], and instituting the one-year scholarship” big-time college began to serve its own interests rather than the universities or their student-athletes (192). “When universities and conferences won the right to negotiate their own television contracts in 1984, and the competition for market share intensified, coaches were in a position to cash in.”* Huge, president-humbling salaries (PSU’s Spanier earned a mere $800K this year) followed.

But the exorbitant pay awarded to college coaches isn’t the only blemish on the system. While it has shot up shamelessly since the early 1970s, the compensation (essentially tuition, room, and board) at schools with big-time athletic programs has barely budged. “It’s socialism for athletes,” sociologist Allen Sack told New York Magazine, and “free enterprise for everyone else.” Agreeing that student athletes should be paid, Taylor Branch offered a devastating critique of the current system in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “[T]he real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited,” Branch writes, “it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

Since its improbable emergence on the most cerebral of campuses in the late 19^th century, college football has represented something of an anomaly—a consistently irresistible anomaly, it should be noted. Male-dominated and devastatingly brutal, it plays out its gridiron dramas nearly every Saturday at institutions which aim at very different ends during the week. Such tensions date at least to 1892, the year, Oriard notes, when the newly established University of Chicago hired Amos Alonzo Stagg, “a former Yale All-American, two years out of college, to start a football program [and agreed] to pay him as much as the school’s top professors in order to lure him from the East Coast.”^ In Stagg’s day, football deaths were common and corruption was rampant.

But don’t count on college football’s extinction, or even its radical reform, any time soon. Though the decimal points have moved to the right, the often indefinable allure of this sport—along with the celebrity it generates, the money it attracts, the ethical corruption and moral deprivation it sometimes invites—endures as ever. More on that, maybe, some other time.

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*Michael Oriard, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192, 193.

^Oriard, Bowled Over, 191

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"

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Art Remillard is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. His book, Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era will be out this December with the University of Georgia Press. His current research looks at religion and sports in the American South from the Civil War through World War II. In this his first post for the H.S. blog, Art explains how his course on religion and sports offers a "bridge" for students to better understand broader themes in American religious history and theories of religion.

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"
Art Remillard

Before teaching my first college course, a friend recommended that I read Marilla Svinicki and Wilbert J. McKeachie's Teaching Tips. I recall taking to heart the book's repeated emphasis on developing learning strategies, "that help students to build bridges between what they already know or have experienced and what they are trying to learn." Once I started teaching, I found sports to be an effective "bridge." Truth be told, I'm not much of a sports fan (except for college football—then I get weird). But I follow closely enough so that, for example, I can compare the Steelers and Browns rivalry to that of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Trust me, it makes sense.

In between my first teaching experience and now, I have taken a greater academic interest in sports, to the point where I have developed a course titled "Religion and Sports." Here, I use sports to investigate major trends in American religious history, while also touching on some theories of religion. I've taught it twice now, and student responses have been quite positive. Yet, many who enroll don't know what to expect. Some anticipate a course on what sportswriter Frank Deford has called "Sportianity," or when self-described Christian athletes, "endorse Jesus, much as they would a new sneaker or a graphite-shafted driver." Think: Kurt Warner. The course does mention the Sportians (via Deford's article), but I'm more interested in the creative ways that people have inscribed religious meaning on to athletic pursuits.

So on "opening day," I invite students to cross a bridge from their hometown YMCA to "muscular Christianity." I cite Luther Gulick, his efforts to institute athletics at the Y, and his lifelong quest to understand "the relation of good bodies and good morals." I then turn to his colleague, James Naismith. On January 20, 1892, the Presbyterian minister gathered eighteen young men at a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, to play his newly invented game called "basketball." Practically, Naismith hoped that basketball would give restless young men a suitable indoor activity for the long winter months. More importantly, as theologian Michael Novak summarizes, "The idea behind the game was moral, Christian, and hygienic: active clean living through vigorous exercise." Right from the gun, then, students discover the religious roots of a familiar game. Later in the course, drawing mostly from Bill Baker's Playing With God, I locate Gulick, Naismith, and other "muscular Christians" within the social gospel tradition, and discuss how they sought to Christianize all corners of society, from the schoolhouse to the gymnasium.

Another bridge brings students to the land of religious pluralism. I reference Julie Byrne's O God of Players to show how the female Catholic cagers at Immaculata College invented religious practices to express their newfound role as athletes. Richard Ian Kimball's Sports in Zion helps me to define the contours of "muscular Mormonism." From Steven A. Riess's edited volume, Sports and the American Jew, I recall the fascinating careers of great Jewish athletes, from the championship boxer Benny Leonard, to the great slugger Hank Greenburg. To examine "seekers," I talk about Phil Jackson, whose Sacred Hoops adds to Naismith's game a spiritual soup complete with Buddhist and Native American flavors. As for American Muslims, I feature marathoner Khalid Khannouchi and his twin challenge of running 100 mile weeks while also observing the Ramadan fast.

Alongside the course's historical conversation, I build bridges to some basic theories of religion. This is actually easier than I had first anticipated. Most of my students are from western and central Pennsylvania. They have been in (or live in) houses with rooms devoted to the Steelers. They have seen (or own) trucks painted black and gold. And they have observed (or participated in) the curious tradition of wearing Steelers jerseys to church. So I try to make sense of these and other activities by using the intellectual resources developed by religious studies scholars. This semester, I might mention Tim Tebow—not as a Sportian—but rather, for his persona that one Denver Bronco recently labeled, "the Tebow thing." From what I can tell, Tebow's "thing-ness" matches with Max Weber's definition of charisma, "a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities."

The weeks always seem to pass too quickly and I never make it to every bridge that I had hoped to go over. Still, the bridges that we do cross transform students' understanding of how religion and sports fit within American history and culture. I hope that professor McKeachie would approve.

Sports, History, and Culture

Randall Stephens

With the Super Bowl and the Puppy Bowl over, and the barrage of clever and not-so-clever ads that went with the former, I've been thinking about the history of sports. I admit, I know little to nothing about the subject. (I do know that a class on the history of sports would probably populate.)

I am fascinated by how recreation has changed over the centuries. Has it become less violent, less like hand-to-hand combat? Of course, we do have ultimate fighting in are era, and their are all sorts of ways to die in a high-speed Nascar race, but it strikes me that common sports are less violent than they were in previous ages. A man does not need to train an animal to kill another animal to show that he is a force to be reckoned with.

Is it natural that sports should become more humane? Would dog fighting or bear baiting have struck late antebellum Americans as being as cruel and debased as most Americans think those are today? Ideas about propriety and impropriety appear to have dominated conversations about recreation for centuries.

There are still class and cultural connotations to sports in our age, much as there were hundreds of years ago. (One of my favorite Onion articles in recent years revealed that "a professional wrestling 'fan' has written a shocking new book that claims wrestling fans are actually paid actors.") But were class and cultural markers much stronger 150 or 200 years ago?

What do sports tell us about the people who have enjoyed them? How long have sports been woven into consumer culture? What can we know about western history be looking at the way men and women "recreated." (I hear that those who work in the subfield of cricket studies have some interesting things to say about empire and global culture.)

Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (Yale, 1999) explores some of these topics. On sport in 17th-century England, he writes:

The gentry enjoyed the sport of their deer parks, their bowls and tennis; communal sports tested men's physical prowess and endurance, absorbing competitive vigor. Local tradition was deeply founded in this respect. In Wiltshire football was entrenched in the downlands, while bat-and-ball games like stoolball and trapball flourished in the vales of the north. East Anglian villages had their 'camping' grounds with their own indigenous and popular team games. There was something for everyone at the Whitsun Cotswold games, held annually from around 1611 on Dover's Hill, a marvelous green amphitheater outside Chipping Camden which is now owned by the National Trust. There was hunting and horse-racing for the nobility and gentry and the old sports, like wrestling, singlestick fighting and shin-kicking, for the country populace. The games were a veritable celebration of manhood which, at least until the 1640s, attracted people of all social ranks from miles around. (94-95)

An observer of late-17th-century England, Guy Miège said a little about sports in his country. Notice the praise for bloodsports and the comment about foot-ball's popularity among the lower sort.
Guy Miège, The New State Of England Under Their Majesties K. William and Q. Mary: In Three Parts (London, 1691), 39-40.