Jack E. Davis is a professor of history and Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (2017). Before joining the faculty at UF in 2003, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Eckerd College, and in […]
Sport
“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library
By Gwendolyn Lockman The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to […]
Medieval Facial Hair in Major League Baseball
by Guy Raffa What is it with baseball players and whiskers? The 2013 Red Sox perfected the art of beard-bonding on the way to their third World Series championship in ten years. Boston players and their fans rallied around what Christopher Oldstone-Moore calls the “quest beard” in his history of facial hair, Of Beards and […]
Muhammad Ali helped make black power into a global brand
Muhammad Ali did not simply choose to be a cultural icon. He was also chosen. Elevated by unsurpassed boxing skills and athletic prowess to become heavyweight champion of the world, Ali transcended sports through radical political activism that has, with the passage of time, been largely smoothed of its rough edges.
Watching Soccer for the Very First Time in the American West
With the European Championships kicking off in France this June, football (soccer) frenzy is gripping the world again so we were wondering: What would the sport look like to someone who had never seen it played? Here’s an answer:
The Revolution will televise football
As football returns to living rooms across the United States, it’s worth remembering that the sport has an international appeal for many who have spent time in this country. Fifty years ago, one such foreign fan led a revolution from Tanzania.
The 1980 Moscow Olympics and my Family
My mother, Rae Straw, and her friend Pam had an odd assignment in 1979 for two travel agents from Houston: selling the Soviet Union to American tourists. For travel agents, such familiarization or “FAM” trips were a regular occurrence, but going to the Soviet Union during the preparations for the 1980 Moscow Olympics was a unique experience.