Events

Past Event

THE SPORTS REVOLUTION: HOW TEXAS CHANGED THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN ATHLETICS

January 25, 2022
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
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FRANK GURIDY, Associate Professor of History & African American and African Diaspora Studies-Columbia University
GEORGE LIPSITZ, Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Event presented via zoom - Registration is Required
Registration: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FIbvd5hMSlyPTXBEn6CKaA

Book Description
In the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation, broadening the boundaries of social and political participation. The Sports Revolution tells how these forces came together in the Lone Star State.

Tracing events from the end of Jim Crow to the 1980s, Frank Guridy chronicles the unlikely alliances that integrated professional and collegiate sports and launched women’s tennis. He explores the new forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerged during the era, including the role the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders played in defining womanhood in the age of second-wave feminism. Guridy explains how the sexual revolution, desegregation, and changing demographics played out both on and off the field as he recounts how the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers and how Mexican American fans and their support for the Spurs fostered a revival of professional basketball in San Antonio. Guridy argues that the catalysts for these changes were undone by the same forces of commercialization that set them in motion and reveals that, for better and for worse, Texas was at the center of America’s expanding political, economic, and emotional investments in sport.

FRANK GURIDY
Frank Guridy is an Associate Professor of History and African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His current research focuses on sport history, urban history, and the history of social movements. Before the publication of his recent book, The Sports Revolution, he wrote the award-winning Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and co-edited Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His current book project, Between Conflict and Community: The Stadium in American Life (under contract with Basic Books), tells the story of the American stadium as a community institution that has been a battleground for social justice since its inception.

GEORGE LIPSITZ
George Lipsitz is Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His twelve single and co-authored books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (2018), A Life in the Struggle (1988), and (with Barbara Tomlinson) Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice (2019). Lipsitz’ s chapter “Space, Sports, and Spectatorship in St. Louis” in How Racism Takes Place (2011) analyzes stadium building as a strategy for civic redevelopment and that book’s chapter “John Biggers and Project Row Houses in Houston” addresses alternative strategies of urban placemaking. He was awarded the American Studies Association’s Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship in 2013 and its Bode-Pearson Prize for Career Distinction in 2016.
https://www.blackstudies.ucsb.edu/people/george-lipsitz

Cosponsor: Department of History-Columbia University