Gender, Sport, Science

Roberta J. Park has been throughout her distinguished career a scholar with a mission - to win academic recognition of the significance of the body in culture and cultures. Her scholarship has earned her global esteem in the disciplines of Physical Education and Sports Studies for its penetrating insights. This selection of her writings is a well-deserved tribute to her interpretive originality, her intellectual acuity and her ability to inspire colleagues and students. To explore unexplored patterns has been her extraordinary strength. The result has been continual originality of insight. These writings are thus a unique compilation of scholastic creativity of major interest to scholars and students in Sports Studies, Physical Education, Health Studies, Sociology and Social Psychology. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

J.A. Mangan is a distinguished scholar in the fields of sports history whose work has inspired a generation of historians and social scientists. He has written extensively on sport in America, including Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon - Aryan Fascism; and The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society. Patricia Vertinsky is Professor of Human Kinetics and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is author of The Eternally Wounded Woman: Doctors, Women and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century; and is co-author of Physical Activity, Aging and Stereotypes; Sites of Sport: Space, Place and Experience, and Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument and Modernism.

- Prologue: Roberta J. Park, Polymathic and Polymorphic Pioneer: A Personal Appreciation J.A. Mangan - 'Embodied Selves': The Rise and Development of Concern for Physical Education, Active Games and Recreation for American Women, 1776-1865 - Biological Thought, Athletics and the Formation of a 'Man of Character': 1830-1900 - Sport, Gender and Society in a Transatlantic Victorian Perspective - Muscles, Symmetry and Action: 'Do You Measure Up?' Defining Masculinity in Britain and America from the 1860s to the Early 1900s - Physiologists, Physicians, and Physical Educators: Nineteenth Century Biology and Exercise, Hygienic and Educative - Science, Service, and the Professionalization of Physical Education: 1885-1905 - 'Cells or Soaring?': Historical Reflections on 'Visions' of Body, Athletics, and Modern Olympism - Roberta J. Park and the 'Impossible Dream': Keeping it Together for Physical Education and the Academy Patricia Vertinsky - List of Roberta J. Park's Publications