Credit Points 10

Coordinator Brett Bennett Opens in new window

Description The subject explores the history of popular sports, including cricket, rugby, soccer, golf, baseball, tennis, the Olympic Games, and table tennis. It uses case studies from different countries and time periods to highlight how sports shaped, and were shaped by national identity, politics, diplomacy as well as class, race and gender. Drawing on examples from Australia and the world, students learn about how the professionalisation of sports in the early 1900s created immense controversy over the participation of working class athletes. It also explores how sports became parts of national identity, such as cricket and rugby in Australia, sumo wrestling in Japan, and baseball in the United States of America. Students taking the subject will learn how popular attitudes towards men’s and women’s sports changed across the twentieth century as a result of large-scale social, political and cultural movements.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Discipline History

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 4 10cp

Check your HECS Band contribution amount via the Fees page.

Level Undergraduate Level 2 subject

Restrictions

Successful completion of 40 credit points in currently enrolled program.

Learning Outcomes

1. Discuss key historical periods in the development of professional and amateur sports from the 1800s to the present;
2. Explain how and when sports facilitated national debates about class, race and gender;
3. Analyse major theoretical interpretations of the globalisation of sports;
4. Examine the way sports facilitated international diplomacy and sanctions regimes during and after the Cold War.

Subject Content

1. Sports: Just a Game? 
2. Games We Play
3. Rules of the Game
4. The Rise of Professional Sports
5. Globalisation of Sports During the Age of Empire
6. Class and the Making of Rugby 
7. Cricket: From ‘Gentleman’s Game’ to International Pariah  
8. Soccer: The Game that Captured the World
9. Tennis
10. Golf: Diplomacy and Power
11. Olympic Games and Diplomacy
12. Cold War sports diplomacy 
13. Sports as Social Movements