Replaying American History through Sports: Frank Guridy

Public Historians at Work

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A history of sports can be a history of the United States. So says Dr. Frank Guridy, an American historian at Columbia University and author of the book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021). In his conversation with Dr. Mark Goldberg on April 13, 2021, Dr. Guridy explains how issues of race, labor, gender, and politics materialize in the stadium, whether it is segregated teams under Jim Crow or singing the national anthem before a game starts. As such, historians can use popular sports to enter the public arena, telling untold and silenced stories of marginalized communities to wide audiences outside the university.
For more on Dr. Guridy's work, see https://history.columbia.edu/person/guridy-frank/ and Twitter @fguridy.

The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph