This book covers a wide range of issues and controversies within the world of sports—including drug use, economics, ethics, ethnicity, gender, globalization, politics, race, sexuality, and technology—from both a U.S. and global perspective. World Sports: A Reference Handbook covers a wide variety of sports-related controversies, including ethical, political, technological, business, and social issues related to the phenomenon of sports. Many of the larger topics are covered from multiple angles, often providing both a global and American perspective. The work provides unique insights into the commonly addressed subject of sports, supplying information that most readers will find unfamiliar and thought-provoking. Addressing forms of sports as diverse as American football, skateboarding, NASCAR auto racing, ultrarunning, and the disciplines of the Olympic Games, the title's topics are discussed in depth to illuminate the sport's specific issues and are backed with information from relevant sports organizations, biographies of important people, chronologies, and charts and graphs. The information within this handbook is based upon the latest academic research but presented in very accessible language, making it appropriate for high school and undergraduate students as well as general readers.

In this impressive book, Barbara Keys offers the first major study of the political and cultural ramifications of international sports competitions in the decades before World War II. Focusing on the United States, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, she examines the transformation of events like the Olympic Games and the World Cup from relatively small-scale events to the expensive, political, globally popular extravaganzas familiar to us today.

 Chariot races. Gladiatorial combat. Fishing. Hunting. Swimming. The ancient Romans enjoyed these sports--sometimes with fanatical enthusiasm. This reference book contains more than 100 entries covering sporting events and activities of the era, and the Romans who sponsored, competed in and attended them. Charioteer Appuleius Diocles, in a career spanning 24 years, competed in 4,257 races, winning an astounding 1,462 of them. Alypius, the young friend of St. Augustine, was both drawn to and repulsed by gladiatorial battles and struggled to shake his mania for the spectacle of blood sport. Brief abstracts of the entries are included for quick reference, along with an expansive glossary and biographical notes on the ancient authors cited.

These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.

Globalization and Sport argues that although sport is a source of pleasure, it is also part of the government of everyday life. The creation of a sporting calendar, movements of rational recreation and the development of public sector physical education, are read as ways of disciplining and shaping urban-industrial populations.

Contains knowledge from sports management, sports science, human movement studies, sport history, and sport sociology synthesised in 450 comprehensive illustrated articles. Covers key social issues such as doping, racism, sexism, civic life, youth participation and public policy, with all perspectives covered.

Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.