American Studies Commons^™

The Four Seasons: Integrating The Big Four Sports, Joseph S. Brody

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After World War II, even though many African Americans served their country, policies of segregation were rampant throughout the United States of America. The aim of this Capstone is two-fold. First, to shed light on the men who followed the path of Jackie Robinson and give them their due. The most appropriate way to convey my research of these four athletes was by putting them all in the same fictional setting and discussing their trials and tribulations that made them the men they were in their day. Second, I want to highlight the many things I found in my research …

The Expression Of The Hijab In American Sports Culture, Nicholas Duca

Sacred Heart University Scholar

Many sports in the West, specifically in American culture, permit religious symbols and practices. Yet Muslim women have been subject to discrimination, bigotry, and disrespect for wearing or wanting to wear a hijab. This study uses philosophical theory, data, and cultural information to explore the stigma behind Muslim women in America and their participation in the sporting activities that are held here. This piece explains how the hijab’s true meaning is dismantled through American culture and the religious meaning behind it, argues why it should be allowed in sporting events, and suggests ways to prevent discrimination against Muslim women who …

Escrime Americana: The History Of Discrimination In American Fencing From The 1700s-1950, Alyssa J. Hirsch

Honors College Theses

This research paper will focus on the history of discrimination in American fencing from 1700-1950. The time frame covers the colonial origins of the sport in America, through segregation practices up to 1950. This project will analyze the origins of classism, sexism, and racism in American fencing, and how it connects to how racism, sexism, and classism have operated in the United States. There has been no previous research conducted into the history of discrimination in fencing exclusively, so this is new territory.

The research for this paper includes primary sources provided by the head historian of U.S. fencing, Andy …

¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? Resisting The Ritual Theologizing Of Nation, Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández

Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology

No abstract provided.

The Female Athlete Through An Olympic Lens: Media Coverage Of Women’S Ice Hockey And Its Impact On Gender Equality, Chandler Solimine

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of The Game Of Pool In Ernest Hemingway’S “Soldier’S Home”, Molly J. Donehoo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In his 1929 A Farewell to Arms, American Author Ernest Hemingway provides the thesis for all of American Modernism when he writes, “the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places” (216). If the world breaks everyone Hemingway’s focus becomes not in the breaking but in the solutions for becoming strong at the broken places. Throughout his canon Hemingway presents the healing rituals and therapeutic patterns that govern sports and game as a solution to becoming strong at the broken places. While critics have closely analyzed and scrutinized some of his most recognized short-stories, stories …

Greater New York: The Sports Capital Of Depression Era America, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

Any history of the Great Depression is incomplete if it neglects sports, and New York City was the unrivaled sports capital of America. From professional baseball to college basketball to boxing, the most important sporting events took place in New York's legendary venues: Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, Madison Square Garden, Forest Hills, and Belmont Park. Sports also mirrored social issues. Joe Louis's boxing matches against white opponents represented more than a simple athletic contest and stimulated racial and ethnic pride, especially in his bouts with Max Schmeling. Long Island University's dominant basketball team boycotted the 1936 Olympic trials to …

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Athletes In Professional Sports, J. Michael Hunter

J Michael Hunter

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Athletes in Professional Sports” provides profiles with career highlights of over 200 Mormon athletes in professional sports, including baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, football, golf, hockey, racing, running, volleyball, and wrestling. This chapter appears in the second volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

Divided They Fall: The Pacific Coast League’S Failed Attempt To Turn Major, Sean Beireis

History Undergraduate Theses

For over fifty years the Pacific Coast League was considered the highest level of organized baseball west of the Mississippi River. As the population of the West grew in the 1940s and 1950s the Coast League attempted to use their geographic isolation and large population base as assets in an attempt to join the American and National Leagues as a third Major League. This paper details how the Coast League members’ inability to agree on a strategy for League growth led to the collapse of the powerhouse that was the PCL.

Contesting The Marginalization Of Female Leadership In Sports: The Struggle For Equal Opportunities In Men's Collegiate And Professional Basketball, Caitlain Tinker

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This feminist critique interrogates the discourses and practices of gender discrimination in men's professional and collegiate sporting institutions in the United States. This study focuses on delineating and 'naming' the discriminatory ideologies that are (re)produced by dominant social and cultural institutions, revealing in the process how these practices (over)determine gender equality in the professional and collegiate sporting field. To this end, I perform a post-structuralist discourse analysis of what Louis Althusser calls the dominant 'ideological state apparatuses,' namely schools, the media and sporting institutions. I argue that these institutions coalesce to form a network of power that produces, reproduces, and …

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Athletes In Professional Sports, J. Michael Hunter

Faculty Publications

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Athletes in Professional Sports” provides profiles with career highlights of over 200 Mormon athletes in professional sports, including baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, football, golf, hockey, racing, running, volleyball, and wrestling. This chapter appears in the second volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

An Evaluation Of Reactivity To Observer Presence While Self-Monitoring To Improve Swimming Performance, Sara Wendi Schonwetter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study evaluated the effects of self-monitoring by swimmers to improve their performance at practice and assessed the effects of reactivity to observer presence on their performance. Additionally, it investigated the accuracy of the swimmers' self-reports. Seven public high school swim team members used program boards to self-monitor in order to increase the number of assigned laps completed at practice. Reactivity to observer presence was assessed by having a confederate record the number of laps completed during observer absent conditions. A series of AB replications and an ABAB reversal design were used. The percentage of assigned laps completed increased …

Using A Goal-Setting And Feedback Procedure To Increase Running Distance, Stephanie Wack

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Goal-setting procedures have been employed in many different sports, and have been shown to be a beneficial component for enhancing sports performance. For this study, a changing-criterion within multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate a multi-component intervention for increasing running distance for five healthy adults. The intervention consisted of goal setting with performance feedback. Participants set a short-term goal each week and a long-term goal to achieve upon completion of the study. The study incorporated the use of the Nike^TM + SportKit for automated recording of the distance of each run. Results of the current study demonstrated for all …

Inside Nfl Marriages: A Seven Year Ethnographic Study Of Love And Marriage In Professional Football, Rachel Anne Binns Terrill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When women marry NFL players and subsequently become NFL wives, they are thrust out of the lives they have known and into a form of secondary socialization among other NFL wives. In this dissertation, I use ethnography and narrative inquiry, the first- person narratives of four NFL wives, interactive interviews with dozens of NFL wives, friendship as method, and my personal autoethnographic experiences to describe the social interactions between NFL wives, the themes of their marriages, and the trajectories of their identity formation and transformation of NFL wives during their time in the league.

I also use autoethnography and writing …

Crabb, Alfred Leland, 1884-1979 (Mss 367), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and bibliography (click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 367. Correspondence, book and article manuscripts, and research material of Alfred Leland Crabb, a native of Warren County, Kentucky and later professor at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee. The topics of the manuscripts include historical fiction related to Nashville and Bowling Green, biographies of prominent Nashvillians, and articles on all levels of education. Much of the unpublished material is fiction but draws from Crabb's Plum Springs school days and his student experiences at Western Kentucky University.

New Media Photographic Representations Of Women`S Collegiate Volleyball: Game Faces, Action Shots, And Equipment, Alicia Pack

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Researchers consistently find that mainstream media often represent women athletes in stereotypical ways including trivialization, sexualization, infantilization, passivity, and utilization of camera down-angles. However, research on new media's visual representation of women athletes is still in its infancy. This study adds to the growing literature on new media's representation of women athletes and concurs with previous findings suggesting that new media might be an outlet that can counter old media gender stereotypes. This thesis used mixed methods of qualitative content analysis and photovoice in order to better understand how Big East volleyball players are represented in photographs on websites: Instances …

Usf's Coverage Of Women's Athletics: A Census Of The Usf Athletics Home Web Page, Laura Ann Lebeau

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the coverage of women’s athletics at USF provided through photographic representations on the university’s Athletics Internet home web page during the 2009–2010 academic year. Findings from this census of five areas that comprise the USF Athletics Internet home web page revealed that, consistent with recent research on coverage of female athletes and women’s athletics on university web pages, women, compared to men, were underrepresented in the majority of the five areas of the home page analyzed. The difference in the number of overall total photographs of women and men was not that large—48% and 52%, respectively, not …

Truly Sovereign At Last: C.B.C. Distribution V. Mlb Am And The Redefinition Of The Concept Of Baseball, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

This article is the second in the author’s series examining the interplay between baseball and the law (the first being The Sovereign Nation of Baseball: Why Federal Law Does Not Apply To “America’s Game” And How It Got That Way, 16 Vill. Sports & Ent. L.J. 49 (2009)). The Sovereign Nation of Baseball provided the groundwork for this series by discussing how federal courts have historically deferred to those who have traditionally run Major League Baseball (the office of the Commissioner of Baseball as well as the cabal of club owners), bending the rules that would otherwise dictate the resolution …

The Sweet Script: A Critical Analysis Of American Sportswriting, Jonathan Schreiber

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis analyzes the sportswriting genre as a form of personal essay. It explores the art over time through writers Red Smith, A.J. Liebling, Roger Angell, George Plimpton, Bart Giamatti, Frank Deford, and Rick Reilly, as well as anthologized writers from 2008 and blogs.

Publicly Posted Feedback With Goal Setting To Improve Tennis Performance, Gretchen Mathews

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A review of the literature regarding Applied Behavior Analysis within various sports settings shows that behavioral coaching is more effective than traditional coaching methods. Specifically, goal setting and publicly posted feedback improved the athletic performance of college level football players in two studies, and high school soccer players in one study. The present study found goal setting and publicly posted feedback improved tennis performance for six participants. A multiple baseline across participants design was used. Specifically, the participants improved their corner hitting ability, which is an important competitive shot in tennis. The participants improved their corner hitting ability from an …

Street-Ball: The Myth Of The Ghetto Basketball Star, Vincent F. Mcsweeney

Honors Scholar Theses

In recent decades, countless scholars have examined the developing trend of African American dominance in United States’ professional sports. Many have hypothesized that this over-representation is caused by the presumed reliance on sports as an avenue out of poverty for the African American youths. This trend, it is believed, has a highly detrimental effect the African American community. In actuality, this argument is flawed because it works under the stereotypical assumption that the overwhelming majority of African Americans come from abject poverty. To dispel this fallacy, the author has analyzed the upbringings of each All-National Basketball League First Team player …

Major League Baseball Franchises And Their Minor League Players, Maintaining A Relationship On And Off The Field, Michelle Keating

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today's professional arena, organized sports have grown to become institutionalized and highly organized through corporations in a multi-billion dollar industry. Through the use of in depth interviews completed online, this study investigated the role franchise communication plays in the development of nineteen minor league players' relationships within the Major League Baseball (MLB) sports industry. Results found that players feel their organizations disproportionately help some players achieve success over others and withhold information. As players, they felt they have a limited voice regarding the direction of their careers. Despite a difficult working environment, the players' desire to achieve success and …

The Proliferating Sacred: Secularization And Postmodernity, Donald Surrency

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When analyzing the role religion plays in contemporary American society, one is forced to address the notion of secularization. This is a term that broadly refers to the marginalization of religious influence in culture and society that began at the outset of the Enlightenment, sometime during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but, as Peter Berger argues, can actually be traced back to the times of the great Israelite prophets who emerged during the Axial Age (800-200 BCE). Throughout the available literature, proponents of the secularization thesis extend the marginalization of religious influence from the societal level to the level of …

Winning It All: The Cinematic Construction Of The Athletic American Dream, Andrew Miller

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Powered by a philosophy of self-determination and an ideology of a level playing field, the Athletic American Dream has become firmly entrenched in American culture. Following narrative pattterns influenced by both newspaper sports sections and juvenile sports fiction, it coalesces around underdog-to-champion, hard-work-leads-to-victory narratives that shape the sporting imagination and help to forge the masculine ideal that is the foundation of American self-image. The Athletic American Dream is produced, packaged and sold by mass media so successfully that one could argue that it becomes the most dominant vision of the American Dream by the end of the twentieth century.

Sports And The American Sacred: What Are The Limits Of Civil Religion?, Frank Ferreri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines whether American civil religion, in its enactment in daily American life, is cosmological. That is, it questions whether the sacred behind American civil religion is present in the physical-material realm and not in a transcendental principle or being. It is interested in why, seemingly, what is sacred in American culture is always what is happening here and now. This is evidenced by and manifested in multiple vehicles of the sacred in American culture. These vehicles include a range of institutions from economics to politics to religion to education. They also include entities such as the mass media, …

Effects Of Faculty And Peer Mentoring On Perceived Stress And Social Support Of College Student Athletes, Valerie R. Pfister

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mentoring programs often focus on assisting students with the transition to college life and encouraging academic success. This study consisted of a quantitative examination of faculty and peer mentoring and freshmen student athletes' perceived transitional stress and social support. Surveys that provided a numerical value to perceived stress and social support supplied a basis for comparison. In addition, a qualitative element, consisting of personal interviews, was used to assess the quality of the mentoring relationships that developed.

Volunteer mentors were trained on mentoring strategies by the researcher. Sixty-one student-athlete volunteers from the sports of baseball, basketball, cheerleading, cross country, competitive …

Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in the book's …

Media Sports Stars: Masculinities And Moralities (Book Review), Andrew C. Miller

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Book review by Andrew C. Miller.

Whannel, G. (2002). Media sports stars: Masculinities and moralities. Routledge.

Franco-American Business, Jan-May 1991 (Scrapbook #8), Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau, Therese Laurendeau, Lione Laurendeau

Scrapbooks

Newspaper clippings with photographs of business ads, promotions, sports, school events, births, real estate, and local politics etc., from Lewiston and Auburn, Maine from 1991.

Jacques Cartier Club De Raquetteurs Reglements Des Commis De La Cantine, Le Club Jacques Cartier

Le Club Jacques Cartier

Le Club Jacques Cartier bylaws c. 1940.