Making the American team
Subtitle: sport, culture, and the Olympic experience
By: Mark Dyreson.
Series: Sport and society
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 269
Subjects: Sports -- Political aspects -- United States.; Nationalism and sports -- United States.; Sports -- Social aspects -- United States.; Olympics -- Philosophy.
Description: Mark Dyreson locates the invasion of sport at the heart of American culture at the turn of the century. It was then that social reformers and political leaders believed that sport could revitalize the "republican experiment," that a new sense of national identity could forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order as it would serve to link America's thinking classes with the experiences of the masses.

Nowhere was this better exemplified than in American accounts of the Olympic Games held between 1896 and 1912. In connecting sport to American history and culture, Dyreson has stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-252) and index.
Table of contents: title: Inventing the sporting republic; title: Athens, 1896 : "See the conquering heroes come"; title: Paris, 1900 : exhibiting American athletic nationalism; title: St. Louis, 1904 : an "all-American" Olympics; title: The limits of universal claims : how class, gender, race, and ethnicity shaped the sporting republic; title: Athens, 1906, and London, 1908 : Uncle Sam was all right; title: Stockholm, 1912 : the sporting republic's zenith; title: The idea of a sporting republic : athletic technology, American political culture, and progressive visions of civilization; title: The decline of the sporting republic.