Tempering the Dichotomous Flame: Social History, Cultural History, and Postmodernism(s) in the Journal of Sport History, 1974–2014

In the June 2014 issue of the Journal of American History, which includes a forum titled “State of the Field: Sports in American History,” Amy Bass argues that, as many humanities-based disciplines adopted tenets of cultural history, sport history did not. Based on over a decade of debate about social, cultural, and postmodernist paradigms, Bass’s assertion illuminates continuing historiographical arguments about epistemology and theory in sport history. In this article, I respond to these discussions by analyzing 405 full-length articles in the Journal of Sport History from the first issue in 1974 through the end of 2014. Drawing on philosopher R. Scott Kretchmar’s caution against “dualisms [and] dichotomies” in sport scholarship, I argue for a holistic understanding of sport history, rather than the dichotomous historiography present over the past decade.