Join Frank A. Guridy (Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History; Executive Director of the Holder Initiative), Amira Rose Davis (Assistant Professor and Harrington Faculty Fellow in African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin), and Dave Zirin (author, filmmaker, and sports editor at The Nation) as they discuss Professor Guridy's new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play.
About The Stadium
The “deep and impactful” story of the American stadium (Howard Bryant, author of Full Dissidence)-from the first wooden ballparks to today’s glass and steel mega-arenas-revealing how it has made, and remade, American life.
Stadiums are monuments to recreation, sports, and pleasure. Yet from the earliest ballparks to the present, stadiums have also functioned as public squares. Politicians have used them to cultivate loyalty to the status quo, while activists and athletes have used them for anti-fascist rallies, Black Power demonstrations, feminist protests, and much more.
In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.
Moving between the field, the press box, and the locker room, this book recovers the hidden history of the stadium and its important role in the struggle for justice in America.