Sport in History

Join us as Max Portman talks to Samuel M Clevenger, assistant professor in the department of Kinesiology at Towson University, as they discuss his most recent book 'Physical culture and the biopolitics of the international garden city movement: Planning healthy recreation' , published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2025. Max and Sam cover a multitude of different areas discussing how sport and physical...

“For centuries the Jewish race in Britain has absorbed British culture ... But not all connect Jews with any marked leanings towards our own national amateur sports and pastimes” [Leeds Mercury, 1926, “The Jew as Amateur Sportsmen”] Statements like these can be found manifold in English newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While Anglo-Jewry grew significantly during t...

Join us for our latest episode as Max Portman interviews Alan Hester, lifelong Reading fan and founder and namesake of Alan Hester Associates about his book 'Tiny Keeper: Steve Death, Record Breaker, Shy Genius and Maverick ', published by Pitch Publishing in March 2025. Tiny Keeper , a labour of love about a boyhood idol based on interviews with other heroes, is his first sports book and tracks t...

Join us for the latest episode of the Sport in History Podcast as Max Portman talks to David Searle, former executive director of the University Boat race between Oxford & Cambridge which is due to take place this weekend in London for it's 171st edition this year. In a in-depth interview, David reveals with much honesty how he got into rowing, the impact it has had on his life from a young ag...

Join us for a special edition of the Sports and Leisure History Seminar Series at Silverstone Museum as we host a discussion on the book  Streaming the Formula 1 Rivalry: Sport and the Media in the Platform Age  by Professors Raymond Boyle, Professor of Communications at the University of Glasgow and Richard Haynes, Professor of Media Sport in the Division of Communications, Media and Cu...

Join us on our latest episode as Max Portman interviews Alan McDougall, Lifelong Liverpool fan and Professor of History from the University of Guelph in Canada for his book Dreams and Songs to Sing: A People's History of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp, published in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Dreams and Songs to Sing is a unique people's history of the triumphs and tragedies...

Tanya Aldred ( The Guardian ) interviews ECB's Laura Entwistle, former international cricketer Laura MacLeod and journalist Raf Nicholson about the forthcoming Women's T20 World Cup which is being hosted this summer in England and Wales. The panelists discuss the potential for legacy, how the tournament will test the new women's domestic structure, and how we should measure the success of the Worl...

8 Months on from the book , A Most Unsuitable Game: Celebrating Scottish Women’s Football Fifty Years After the Ban  was completed and released, the Sports and Leisure History Seminar series is pleased to announce an event to celebrate the book and discuss it with its three main authors and editors, Professor Fiona Skillen, Dr Karen Fraser and Julie McNeill.  In this seminar, the editors...

In the earliest depictions of the schoolgirl in British girls’ fiction, she is far from the hockey stick wielding tomboys recognisable in the stories of Angela Brazil and Elinor Brent-Dyer, instead restricted to crocodile walks and movement-limiting dress codes. Over the first decades of the twentieth-century, popular depictions of the schoolgirl radically changed her into a games fanatic, distinc...

If you were watching or were at the England Vs Wales football match last month, you may have seen a cap ceremony that saw Frank Soo, the first Asian player ever to play for the national team (albeit in semi-official matches only) and the only man of East Asian descent to date, receive a posthumous cap for his nine appearances for the England team during World War 2. But who was Frank Soo? And much...

Join Max Portman as he speaks to a true legend of academic sports history in Professor Tony Collins, Emeritus Professor of History at De Montfort University and a Fellow of the Institute of Sports Humanities at Loughborough University. The two are discussing Tony's new book Roy Francis: Rugby’s Forgotten Black Leader, published by Bloomsbury Sport in June 2025. Tony's book covers the life of Roy f...

So many of the world’s sports have their origins in Britain. Why is this? How did sports innovate and evolve in step with social upheaval, and political and cultural change? Why did British forms of play become so influential around the world? Richard Holt explores all these questions and more in a new edition of Sport and the British: A Modern History . For over thirty years Sport and the British...

The podcast is excited to share with you this roundtable from the 2025 British Society of Sports History Conference at Ulster University which celebrated 30 years of Sports History being studied at De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester, UK. The panel was chaired by current DMU associate professor Heather Dichter, alongside DMU emeritus professor Richard Holt and former students of Sports Histo...

This episode features Matthew Brown, winner of the 2024 Lord Aberdare Book Prize, giving his Lord Aberdare Prize Keynote lecture, at the 2025 BSSH Conference at Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Professor Matthew Brown is professor of Latin American history at the University of Bristol. Professor Brown delivered a wonderful and engaging keynote that covered a wide-ranging overvi...

Women falling off bicycles or crashing into men, society women assembled neatly next to a bicycle (but rarely sat upon), women cycling along telegraph wires, socialising in gentile city-centre parks or cycling through space and time as celestial figures; visuals of cycling women are ambiguous and complex. In many ways, these visuals reflect enduring confusion with how to depict and respond to femi...

Join Max Portman as he speaks to Ben Robinson, an investigate journalist and series producer for the BBC about Ben's book "The Trillion Dollar Conman: The Astonishing True Story of the Most Audacious Fraud in Sport", released in October 2024 by Icon Books. Ben's book covers the high and lows of the 2009/10 football season, where Notts County, the world's oldest professional football club (founded...

Today, leisure is often seen as a universal right – accessible to all, regardless of background. Yet historically, access to leisure and sport was highly regulated and deeply unequal. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, who had leisure time, what kind of sport they could pursue, and where and how they could do so, was determined by intersecting factors of gender, race, and especially class. This...

Join Max Portman as he interviews Katharine Worth, PhD Student at the University of Western Australia & Collections And Research officer (which cleverly spells CAR officer) at Silverstone Museum about her thesis on nationalism within British Motor racing since 1894. Recorded on a sunny spring day in Silverstone at the museum and during many tea breaks for Katie, Max & Katie discuss how nat...

Join Max Portman as he interviews Dr Dan Covell of Western New England University, Massachusetts in the United States to talk about his recently published article in our journal ' Sport in History ' titled ‘Strictly a power play’: Jack Langer and Yale University versus the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). In what is an aptly-timed interview with the NCAA's premier competition, Marc...

The 1945 Dynamo Moscow tour of Britain stands as a significant event in postwar sporting history. It has been studied extensively as a diplomatic event that ultimately failed to improve relations between the Soviets and the British, but was successful in promoting Soviet prestige within the state. With the onset of the Cold War, sides from the two states would not meet again until 1954, following...

Thanks to our friends over at the Cricket Research Network, we are delighted to bring you this panel discussion chaired by historian and journalist Raf Nicholson in conversation with Beth Barrett-Wild (Director of the Women's Professional Game at the England & Wales Cricket Board) and Claire Taylor (MCC, London Spirit and Berkshire Cricket Foundation) as they reflect on the future of women's c...

Whilst scholars have tended to focus on hegemonic internationalist sporting practices and their promotion of peace, this paper explores peace activists’ use of sport as a means to create a community of anti-war individuals, on both the domestic and international levels. This study looks at two organisations to ascertain the role of physical activity in pacifism organisations: the League of Nations...

Join Max Portman as he interviews artist Colin Yates on sport and "art as a message", discussing how Colin's career and major projects have highlighted art as a message through the lens of football. Talking primarily about football for an aptly-timed 90 minutes (plus 3 minutes of injury time),  Max and Colin cover a lot of ground, discussing how Colin's major projects on Black Footballers and...

Join Podcast host & editor Max Portman as he interviews Peter Mason, Journalist with the Guardian Newspaper & author of several books on music, food, carnival culture and sport, as they discuss Peter's latest book on the West Indian Cricketing Legend, Sir Clyde Walcott. In an engaging 50-minute conversation, Max and Peter cover a lot of ground, discussing Clyde's legacy not only as on...

This paper examines the provision of sports injury treatment in the Republic of Ireland during the period from 1950 until 2010. By the late 1960s, talks on the prevention and treatment of sports injuries were being held sporadically. How initial centres for the specialised treatment of sports injuries were developed in the 1970s is assessed. Sports related physiotherapy and professional treatment...