Available in paperback for the first time, Cricket and Community in England: 1800 to the Present Day is a path-breaking enquiry into the social history of the summer game. It is written by two specialist cricket historians and based on extensive primary research. It traces the history of the sport at grassroots level from its origins right up to the present day. It will appeal to the cricket historian and the general sports enthusiast alike. The book has two main goals: to provide readers with an accessible introduction to the history of grassroots cricket in England and to supply a clear overview of the different phases of this history. The structure of book is chronological but also thematic. The six chapters look at such issues as early cricket, the origins of clubs, competition, the two world wars, multiculturalism and cricket in the twenty-first century.

This set examines sport and leisure from a social science viewpoint. The volumes included, originally published between 1984 and 1991 take a cross-disciplinary approach to explore the social, political and cultural roles of sport in today's society. They cover issues as diverse as inequality, nationalism, gender, and commercialisation and engage with a range of academic disciplines including cultural studies, history, politics and sociology.

A selection of essays exploring the role of social institutions and political, economic and technological change in shaping the sport of middle class Victorians and Edwardians.

This book tells the story of ‘the Lady Footballers’. It covers their 1895 and 1896 tours through the eyes of the largely unsympathetic British press. It explains gender issues of the time, and the financial problems that doomed this experiment. Despite increasing opportunities in sport for British women during the late nineteenth century, virtually every segment of society opposed the idea of women playing football. In 1895, Nettie Honeyball and Florence Dixie formed the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC) intending to introduce the game to women and girls as a means of recreation and profit, over 10,000 spectators crowded the football ground in London to watch the BLFC in its first match. Nearly every London newspaper covered the event. These women endured public ridicule. They ignited the gender prejudice of the time, and confronted it head on wearing ‘men’s’ kit, and playing ‘men’s rules.’ Football's mystique was that it was a manly sport for men, thus these women footballers symbolized a paradox: those playing well were gender freaks; those not playing well proved it was a male game. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Volume one 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.

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize* This book is the first, full-length scholarly examination of British women’s involvement in equestrianism from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as the corresponding transformations of gender, class, sport, and national identity in Britain and its Empire. It argues that women’s participation in horse sports transcended limitations of class and gender in Britain and highlights the democratic ethos that allowed anyone skilled enough to ride and hunt – from chimney-sweep to courtesan. Furthermore, women’s involvement in equestrianism reshaped ideals of race and reinforced imperial ideology at the zenith of the British Empire. Here, British women abandoned the sidesaddle – which they had been riding in for almost half a millennium – to ride astride like men, thus gaining complete equality on horseback. Yet female equestrians did not seek further emancipation in the form of political rights. This paradox – of achieving equality through sport but not through politics – shows how liberating sport was for women into the twentieth century. It brings into question what “emancipation” meant in practice to women in Britain from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. This is fascinating reading for scholars of sports history, women's history, British history, and imperial history, as well as those interested in the broader social, gendered, and political histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for all equestrian enthusiasts.