What is the relationship between sport and national identity? What can sport tell us about changing perceptions of national identity?
Bringing together the work of established historians and younger commentators, this illuminating text surveys the last half-century, giving due attention to the place of sport in our social and political history.
It Includes studies of:
· English football and British decline
· Englishness and sport
· Ethnicity and nationalism in Scotland
· Social change and national pride in Wales
· Irish international football and Irishness
· Sport and identity in South Africa
· Cricket and identity crisis in the Caribbean
· Baseball, exceptionalism and American Sport
· Popular mythology surrounding the sporting rivalry between New Zealand and Australia
Sport and National Identity in the Post-War World presents a wealth of original research into contemporary social history and provides illuminating material for historians and sociologists alike.
Introduction 1. Sport and national identity in contemporary England 2. 'Your boys took one hell of a beating!' English football and British decline, c.1950-80 3. 'Every day I wake up and I thank the Lord I'm Welsh': sport and national identity in post-war Wales 4. 'Cry for Us, Argentina': sport and national identity in late twentieth-century Scotland 5. Who are the boys in Green? Irish identity and soccer in the Republic of Ireland 6. 'One Nation, One Soul, One Dream, One Goal?' Sport and national identity in South Africa 7. Cricket and a crisis of identity in the Anglophone Caribbean 8. Baseball and American exceptionalism 9. Black against gold: New Zealand-Australia sporting rivalry in the modern era
