| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark Dyreson. Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience. (Sport and Society.) Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 269. Cloth $44.95, paper $18.95.

This volume analyzes two related topics in the history of American sports during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is the rise of a philosophy of sport that championed athletics as a vital institution for promoting both democratic values and nationalism in the United States. The second subject is American participation in the early modern Olympic Games, as medal-winning U. S. athletes gained glory for their nation and its ideals in the arena of international competition. 1

Mark Dyreson's central thesis is that a group of American intellectuals and writers believed that modern sport would "reconstitute popular representative government, restore equity in American society, and rejuvenate public virtue" (p. 3). He argues that statesmen, social activists, philosophers, athletic administrators, journalists, and other molders of public opinion (including Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Walter Camp, Albert G. Spalding, and Price Collier, among others) viewed sport as a social technology that would build a strong sense of community in the United States as Americans struggled to cope with the stresses of industrialization and modernization. Specifically, sport could teach Americans the value of both competition and cooperation, maintain order, and also help to assimilate immigrants, reduce racial and class tensions, and even address gender differences. In short, sport could and should be a powerful tool to help the nation adjust to the challenges of increasing class conflicts, economic dislocations, cultural pluralism, and scientific and technological change. . . .

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