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.

A fascinating, in-depth look at the history of competitive swimming and the people and moments that have defined the sport. From the first modern Olympic Games to the present, Below the Surface: The History of Competitive Swimming covers all the greatest moments, top rivalries, legendary swimmers, and biggest controversies in swimming history. It features athletes like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky, who have elevated the sport to an unprecedented level, and individual performances that are groundbreaking and awe-inspiring, such as Australian Fanny Durack becoming the first female Olympic gold medalist in 1912 and Jason Lezak leading the US to a come-from-behind victory in the 400 freestyle relay at the 2008 Olympics. While controversies such as doping and the advent of tech suits have troubled the sport, a new generation of athletes have produced fresh enthusiasm for competitive swimming. Below the Surface offers little-known stories, unique insight, and a detailed history of a great sport with a remarkable past and an exciting future.

What could be better than diving into cool water on a hot day? In this enormously enjoyable and informative history of swimming, Eric Chaline sums up this most summery of moments with one phrase: pleasure beckons at the water’s edge. Strokes of Genius traces the history of swimming from the first civilizations to its current worldwide popularity as a sport, fitness pastime, and leisure activity. Chaline explores swimming’s role in ritual, early trade and manufacturing, warfare, and medicine, before describing its transformation in the early modern period into a leisure activity and a competitive sport—the necessary precursors that have made it the most common physical pastime in the developed world. The book celebrates the physicality and sensuality of swimming—attributes that Chaline argues could have contributed to the evolution of the human species. Swimming, like other disciplines that use repetitive movements to train the body and quiet the mind, is also a means of spiritual awakening—a personal journey of discovery. Swimming has attained the status of a cultural marker, denoting eroticism, leisure, endurance, adventure, exploration, and excellence. Strokes of Genius shows that there is not a single story of human swimming, but many currents that merge, diverge, and remerge. Chaline argues that swimming will become particularly important as we look toward a warmer future in which our survival may depend on our ability to adapt to life in an aquatic world.

From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.

Dive deep into the world of swimming with open water swimmer and coach Mikael Rosén as he explores the sport through eight different perspectives. With topics ranging from the vigorous mental and physical demands of the sport to gender and race politics, no reader will be left treading water. Rosén also provides a look into the lives of professional swimmers such as Michael Phelps and Sarah Sjöström, sharing insights into what makes these greats super swimmers. Packed with interesting history, science, and trivia, as well as useful charts, maps, sidebars, tips, and strategies—plus plenty of photos sprinkled throughout—this compendium is a must-have for any athlete or swimming fanatic.

They entered the world just five minutes apart, twins swimming out of the womb together, already arguing about who got to lead the way. They grew up together, best friends with rhyming names. They even went to the same college — where one of them had a nervous breakdown, and the other didn't. Grown-up, one of them became a suicidal drunk, the other a success. Now, one is missing, and the other has just three days to find him. It really happened. The History of Swimming details Kim Powers' frantic search for his twin brother Tim who disappears from Manhattan one weekend while in his late 20s. Kim almost mystically imagines that the clues to Tim's whereabouts have been planted in a series of letters written by Tim over the years. Now, Kim uses the letters as a sort of roadmap that takes him to Texas, the setting of their greatest triumphs and tragedies. At the small Texas college where many of these events occurred, Kim falls in with two eccentric traveling companions who guide him on the last leg of his quest, driving through the night to the one final place where Tim might be.

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.