J.M. Barrie ran a cricket team comprised of notable writers, a fact that has never previously been taken seriously in scholarship. Yet a study of the team enriches the history of British culture, literature and sport in the 1880s and 1890s. A brief survey of British culture in those decades, particularly London literary culture, contextualises the emergence of Barrie's Allahakbarries team and demonstrates the historical forces to which the team was responding. The cricket team relied on humour to facilitate bonding, and it was highly effective in enabling its members to accrue social and cultural capital. Beginning as an arriviste set of struggling young writers and artists, the team helped them reinvent themselves as a successful network of rising stars. When Barrie's co-founder threatened the Allahakbarries' status, Barrie rewrote the team's mythology to exclude him. The influence of the Allahakbarries can even be detected in the values and creative processes of the team's three most famous nineteenth-century writers: Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle and Barrie himself. Their cricket exploits seem to have helped these writers develop themes that were fundamental to their literary contributions: access to the countryside; the growing self-assertion of the lower-middle classes; Englishness; and enchantment.
Polish mountaineering historiography is dominated by narratives focused on men's achievements, while women's mountaineering remains under-researched. The development of independent women's climbing in the Tatra Mountains - from the sixteenth century to 1939 - was shaped by both favourable conditions and numerous constraints resulting from a complex system of social, political, and cultural factors. An analysis based on archival sources, memoirs, press reports, and community documents reveals women's path to independent climbing in the male-dominated Tatras. The study identifies the barriers they faced - from social norms and patronising attitudes to media criticism - as well as the support mechanisms that facilitated their activities: emancipatory upbringing, medical advances, education, and inspiration from abroad. Combining a historical perspective with critical theory of sport allows us to see that the Tatras became for women not only a place of physical challenge, but also a space for struggle for independence, recognition, and empowerment. Climbing represented a form of personal freedom, but it did not necessarily equate to support for emancipatory ideals or gender equality. Despite women's significant contributions to the development of mountaineering in the Tatras, their presence in its history remains marginalised.
Histories of women's engagement with sport in Victorian and Edwardian Britain have often overlooked girls' participation, despite the fraught debate concerning girls' physical activity, particularly in formal education, at the time. Attentive to the wealth of representations of active girlhood in British girls' school stories, this article turns to this popular genre as a key resource through which to examine Edwardian girls' burgeoning access to hockey and cricket. The novels of Dorothea Moore, particularly her Manor School series, were trailblazing in their depictions of girls' sports and offer a valuable archive of cultural representations of newly active girlhoods as sport became increasingly central to girls' education at the turn of the twentieth century. Moore represented sport as a tool by which femininity was redefined for a new century of athletic women and girls. The active and sport-devoted schoolgirls of Edwardian children's literature react against the established ideals of passive Victorian femininity, and Moore draws on the language of games from public boys' school cultures to reorient girlhood towards typically masculine modes of honour, discipline, and heroism.
English soccer league football started in 1888. Twelve clubs entered a round robin competition organised by the Football Association and Preston North End FC became the champions in spring 1889. The first continental country to adopt league football, lagging not far behind, was the Netherlands. The Dutch Football and Athletics Association was founded in December 1889 by representatives of nine clubs from exclusively the western part of the country - that is, from Amsterdam, Haarlem, Rotterdam, and The Hague. Based on the authors' research of the past decade, this article aims to describe, as a contribution to early international football history, the first two Dutch football league competitions of 1890-1891, and the events leading up to them. First, it presents a summary of the earliest Dutch football and the run-up to the founding of the national association. Second, it describes the initiation of the national league and the course of the first two seasons, the second of which took full round robin form, focusing not just on match and competition results but also on the administrative hurdles and external interferences which had to be overcome for Haarlemsche FC and Haagsche VV to emerge as the first two champions.
This study examines 'Shun Wu Tang', a traditional martial arts community organisation in Yunlin County, privately operated by martial arts masters. It specifically focuses on the narratives of the third- and fourth-generation inheritors after World War II, aiming to reveal the transmission and development model of traditional Taiwanese martial arts, which are deeply influenced by Minnan culture. By analysing journals, newspapers, and oral histories, we uncover how the century-long history of 'Shun Wu Tang' reflects the landscape of Taiwanese migration and settlement since the late Qing and early Republican periods. The key factors enabling its deep-rooted presence in Taiwan include its hereditary family-based operation, its role in local security and social stability, and its integration with folk religious rituals through martial performances dedicated to deities. The opportunity for international dissemination arose from Taiwan's pressing need to enhance its diplomatic image through cultural exchange in martial arts. The subsequent expansion and consolidation of its overseas presence can be attributed to the profound martial expertise and charismatic leadership of the recent two generations of inheritors, as well as the unwavering commitment of their disciples to upholding the core values of martial ethics and integrity within 'Shun Wu Tang'.
This article provides a historical examination of the re-emergence of genetic sex testing in international athletics, focusing on the legal prohibition of this type of testing. While previous scholarship has primarily addressed scientific and ethical critiques of genetic sex testing, the fact that such testing has also been legally prohibited, most notably through Norway's Biotechnology Act but also through other national and international legal instruments in Europe, is missing from existing analyses. Scientific, ethical, and legal objections converged during the late twentieth century to discredit genetic sex testing, and these objections culminated in formally banning the practice. World Athletics' 2025 decision to re-introduce genetic sex testing must be situated within this longer historical trajectory. The new policy risks colliding with well-established legal frameworks that were erected in response to historical injustices caused by genetic testing. By centring the legal dimension and the history of its emergence, this article advances existing scholarship by demonstrating that genetic sex testing has not been merely ethically fraught and scientifically flawed but was also rendered unlawful. This has major implications for the viability of World Athletics' new policy, which have not so far been sufficiently acknowledged.
Between 1910 and 1940 a physical training college in Silkeborg, Denmark, trained students from across the world in physical education and gymnastics. The founder H.G. Junker's vision was to promote the benefits of progressive physical education. Despite its innovative approach and clear importance, the College has been largely ignored by sports history. This article unearths the history and curriculum of this overlooked space of physical education training, by presenting it as a formative space for women's physical education. Although situated in Denmark, if a transnational methodology and optic is employed, the College becomes a vital environment of physical education training for Britain and its Empire. It acts as an important outpost, exemplifying the vital contribution that Danish and Swedish gymnastics made to the growth in British physical education, especially for women. After tracking the transnational history and curriculum of the College, the final section employs a case study methodology to confirm the College's important legacy. Ultimately this article uses previously unheard archival voices to present the College as a dynamic space of training that embodies a neglected Danish-British history of physical education and amplifies the vital importance of the transnational dynamic for the promotion of women's health, sport, and pedagogy.
Child and youth sport developed rapidly in Sweden during the post-war period, and when sport science emerged in the country beginning in the 1970s, youth sport became a priority research area. Based on the analytical perspective of Science and Technology Studies, this enquiry examines the processes that shaped research on child and youth sport during the 1970s and 1980s. The study shows that when it came to the competitive aspect of youth sport, dominant institutions in sport, politics and education decisively influenced the direction and content of the research. Indeed, the influence of these external institutions was more important for the validation of research findings and perspectives than the open debate over and testing of them by researchers. Based on a limited historical Swedish context, the study highlights general questions about what shapes sport research and what effect it has on sport.
Southern African cricket, an imperial export, was borne out of a history of racial discrimination and segregation. Such racialised political residue destabilised the game in Zimbabwe. Race, power, and politics created tensions along with protracted struggles that became overriding issues in cricket's fierce in-fighting in the country. White people dominated the cricket sport from its introduction in 1890 to the early post-independence years in Zimbabwe. It was an elite sport, along with other sporting disciplines including rugby, hockey, tennis, swimming, and snooker, which the white population in colonial Zimbabwe sought to treat as their enclave. Using newspaper articles, Internet sources, and already published literature, this article reconstructs the history of cricket in Zimbabwe, focusing on its development as an exclusively 'white' game in the colonial period and early post-independence years. Efforts to correct colonial racialisation of the sport through the quota system of the 2000s did not augur well with the performance of the Zimbabwe National Cricket Team, both in the domestic and international arenas. Radical efforts to transform and indigenise cricket from a white to a black game, economic crisis, political polarisation and sport misgovernance crippled the game to its lowest ebb in living memory.
