No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting Review

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(More customer reviews)Reading the reviews, I can understand why a non-knitter would not be charmed by this book. This book is by, for and about knitters. Whenever I'm bogged down with my knitting, I pick this book up again, seeking inspiration from 200 years of American knitters. The book is delightfully written, with lots of original source quotations, and allows us to peek into the day-to-day lives of colonial knitters, revolutionary war knitters, civil war knitters, depression era knitters, etc. It gives one a strong sense of women's role in American society at different times, reminds us (often amusingly) about fads and trends, and shows how wars shape lives beyond the battlefields. It's a wonderful book. My only regret is that it doesn't have more photographs of knitters and old knit garments.

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Drawn from diaries, letters and personal reminiscences, No Idle Hands tells an intimate and sometimes hair-raising story of hand knitting in America from Colonial times onward. Women knit through the hardships of covered wagon travel across the West. They knit to save their husbands and sons from freezing to death on battlefields. Shell-shocked men knit to save their sanity in hospitals during both world wars. No Idle Hands documents the importance knitting has had in American life.--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money Review

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(More customer reviews)As a seminary student with plans enter the priesthood, I found Passing the Plate valuable and helpful. The authors approach the inquiry of "Why American Christians don't give away more money" with genuine concern and interest in those who profess a faith but don't support it financially as their faith suggests they should. The tone throughout the book is measured not to criticize or accuse Christians of fault but moreso to help Christians live up to their faith and to fund the causes in which they believe. I appreciated their motives, processes, honesty and suggestions.
The authors present themselves as sociologists rather than theologians or Christian leaders. Their endeavor is to research and study Christian giving that they might determine the thoughts, attitudes, emotions and resources behind Christian giving or lack of it.
They study and analyze a plethora of data on giving and givers. They perform their own surveys and interviews of Christian leaders and parishoners to get to the core of the issue. The data results of their studies are eye opening to say the least, and most of their statistics are clear and tell a revealing story of who gives, how much they give and why they give or don't give.
The authors offer and test hypotheses of why American Christians don't give more money--at least closer to the 10% tithe prescribed by most Christian organizations. They discuss their findings in relation to these hypotheses.
After discussing their findings, they present suggestions for Christian leaders to implement in their congregations to increase giving in conformity with their faith. These are coherent, practical applications that are not manipulative or conniving but what I think are really helpful suggestions that readers can consider.
I think this book is one that pastors and Christian leaders will find valuable and instructional. I think it will also ease discomfort and anxiety that leaders may have when it comes to discussing money and teaching about finances within their churches.
Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

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Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern Review

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(More customer reviews)Kellner's research examines the construction of social reality by exploring and analyzing contemporary media culture. His work on understanding how cultural identity is shaped by media is an extremely useful and fascinating critique on modern society. In addition, Kellner offers a well-written overview of some of the theory behind the big ideas and concepts used to interpret our media-based world.

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Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artefacts to discern their nature and effects. The book argues that mediaculture is the dominant form of culture which socializes usand provides materials for identity and both social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African-American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head , the Gulf-War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique. This superb book is a major contribution to the growing debate on culture and politics. Assured, fair-minded and constantly stimulating, Media Culture , written by one of the leading figuresin the field, will be widely read and used by all those interested in the subject of culture.

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Soccer Madness: Brazil's Passion for the World's Most Popular Sport Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is worth reading, mostly because there simply aren't many books about Brazilian football, & you have to know about Brazil if you really want to know about football.
Anyway, as a book about sociology of football, it is not bad. At least, there was quite a large amount of research and it showed. It just feels a bit awkward, because, despite the many years the author spent in Brazil, she wasn't born in a country which likes football. So, sometimes what she wrote sounds a bit funny.

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Lever's interest in Brazilian soccer and her friendshipwith Pel led to this thoughtful, well-written account ofBrazilians' madness for spectator sports. Drawing on interviews withsoccer club directors, coaches, players, officials, sportswriters, fanclub leaders, and 200 fans, Lever gives readers a fascinating study ofpeople, culture, and politics. She reaches beyond soccer in Brazil toanalyze both the appeal and the cultural achievement of spectatorsports in all modern societies. Sports, she finds, provide an arenafor dramatizing conflicting loyalties while emphasizing the sharedinterests that make us all alike.

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Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium Review

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(More customer reviews)I had a great experience ordering this book! It is a very useful resource and less expensive than my school book store.

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Globalization defines our era. While it has created a great deal of debate in economic, policy, and grassroots circles, many aspects of the phenomenon remain virtual terra incognita. Education is at the heart of this continent of the unknown. This pathbreaking book examines how globalization and large-scale immigration are affecting children and youth, both in and out of schools. Taking into consideration broad historical, cultural, technological, and demographic changes, the contributors--all leading social scientists in their fields--suggest that these global transformations will require youth to develop new skills, sensibilities, and habits of mind that are far ahead of what most educational systems can now deliver. Drawing from comparative and interdisciplinary materials, the authors examine the complex psychological, sociocultural, and historical implications of globalization for children and youth growing up today. The book explores why new and broader global visions are needed to educate children and youth to be informed, engaged, and critical citizens in the new millennium. Published in association with the Ross Institute

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All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, Revised and Updated Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)The essential argument underlying this book is that human beings want to work. We love work. Work is part of our nature. But human beings don't work with the unstoppable fervor of machines, so the people who dole out work have tried to compress us into the role of industrial robots.
Barbara Garson doesn't pretend to be impartial. She's outspokenly socialist, believing that the people who do jobs are best capable of judging how those jobs ought to be done. She is not looking for a free hand in the world, and she's not looking to loaf on the clock. But when work is stripped of its inherent meaning and reduced to trivial repetetive twists and pulls, this necessarily strips the workers of some of their noble humanity.
Garson began work on this book in the 1970s, and you can tell. Several of her interviewees think they're doing pretty well to be making a buck eighty-five an hour, because that's two dimes better than some of their friends. Her earliest interviewees are bulk industrial workers manufacturing light consumer goods, a field that barely exists in the U.S. these days. Her final interviewees crunch numbers on computers for banks and other institutions, and if anything their work is even more meaningless because they can't see their co-workers and have no idea if the next person on the line is even still alive.
There are a couple of chapters in this book where the author steps back from her interview subjects and draws conclusions. These chapters seem a little preachy, and will offend anybody who believes that the current employment system is the only way it could possibly be. This book is best when Garson stands out of the way of her subjects--cannery workers, auto plant techs, desk jockeys, and more--and trusts them to tell their own story.
If you've ever had a job so trivial that you wonder why you bother, you'll recognize that you're not alone. If you've always been on the top of the heap, you'll gain a broad understanding of what it's like for the people whose shoulders you're standing on. And either way, you're likely to understand why it's so important that workers link arms and stand together, what they lose when they work with blinders on, and what work could be if humanity were restored to its place of honor.

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Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society, Updated (with CengageNOW, InfoTrac 1-Semester Printed Access Card) Review

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(More customer reviews)I purchased this product for a college course and am thoroughly pleased with it. Though used, all the pages are intact with no tears or dog eared corners, and the binding and front and back covers are in excellent condition. The content of the book is great as well, with plenty of images and detailed explanations of all sociological terminology and situations, plus a lot of graphs, charts etc., highlighting the material being covered. The chapter reviews are really helpful, and overall, whether for a class or just as an interest read, this book is a wonderful addition to anybody's bookshelf.

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Examine the sociological meaning in Hurricane Katrina, same-sex marriage, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and scores of modern, compelling issues such as these in Andersen and Taylor's updated new edition of this easy-to-understand text. The book uses research and data to illustrate how class, race-ethnicity, gender, age, geographic residence, and sexual orientation relate to key sociological topics.. Andersen and Taylor inspire you to think for yourself about sociology with the book's "Debunking Society's Myths" features and critical thinking exercises. End-of-chapter summaries in a question-and-answer format provide a built-in review to help you prepare for exams, while an extensive map and illustration program makes concepts easier to understand. View the world through a sociological lens with this best-selling textbook . . . a perpetual favorite with students. This modern book and its fascinating coverage will make you want to read more as you learn to question, challenge, and look at the world like sociologists do.

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Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World Review

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(More customer reviews)Gay Becker's "Disrupted Lives" deals with the normalizing ideologies of American culture which people have to confront when their ideas of normal life trajectories are "disrupted." She reports on different studies of disrupted lives and gives several examples (those of infertility and stroke victims being the most memorable). The theoretical lens Becker builds for her analysis can be extended to other areas of research wherever the analysis of "disruption" is the focus -obvious examples being stories of addiction and recovery, stories of crime and punishment, stories of religious conversion, or other more quotidian disruptions (eg. such as not finishing an academic project). In any case, this book provides a very cogent analysis of how Americans deal with the increasingly disjunctive nature of modernity American-style. One critical remark that scholars of the left may have is that Becker does not make it clear how her approach/material would address larger debates on questions of exclusion by race and class (given the overarching normative trajectory encompassed by the story of the American Dream). On the other hand, Becker gives a longish methodological appendix that explains clearly how she analyzes her narratives. This section is very valuable and offers a general enough method that can be easily extended into to other fields of research not directly covered. This book is a must read for students and scholars of sociology and anthropology whose methods are qualitative and whose findings are based on narrative analysis. I highly recommend this book!

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Our lives are full of disruptions, from the minor--a flat tire, an unexpected phone call--to the fateful--a diagnosis of infertility, an illness, the death of a loved one. In the first book to examine disruption in American life from a cultural rather than a psychological perspective, Gay Becker follows hundreds of people to find out what they do after something unexpected occurs. Starting with bodily distress, she shows how individuals recount experiences of disruption metaphorically, drawing on important cultural themes to help them reestablish order and continuity in their lives. Through vivid and poignant stories of people from different walks of life who experience different types of disruptions, Becker examines how people rework their ideas about themselves and their worlds, from the meaning of disruption to the meaning of life itself.Becker maintains that to understand disruption, we must also understand cultural definitions of normalcy. She questions what is normal for a family, for health, for womanhood and manhood, and for growing older. In the United States, where life is expected to be orderly and predictable, disruptions are particularly unsettling, she contends. And, while continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one because it organizes people's plans and expectations.Becker's phenomenological approach yields a rich, compelling, and entirely original narrative. Disrupted Lives acknowledges the central place of discontinuity in our existence at the same time as it breaks new ground in understanding the cultural dynamics that underpin life in the United States.FROM THE BOOK:"The doctor was blunt. He does not mince words. He did a [semen] analysis and he came back and said, 'This is devastatingly poor.' I didn't expect to hear that. It had never occurred to me. It was such a shock to my sense of self and to all these preconceptions of my manliness and virility and all of that. That was a very, very devastating moment and I was dumbfounded. . . . In that moment it totally changed the way that I thought of myself."

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Leveling the Playing Field: How the Law Can Make Sports Better for Fans Review

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(More customer reviews)Many of the major issues of modern professional sports revolve around issues of the law. Harvard's Henry J. Friendly professor of law Paul C. Weiler believes this firmly and "Leveling the Playing Field" is his attempt to explore this subject. Much of this terrain has been pursued in other works, but Weiler's perspective is interesting. Weiler takes the reader through the looking glass world of the sports business, exploring the nature of free agency, the various revenue streams of the major sports franchises, the long history of the shakedown for new sports complexes paid for with public money, the problems of steroids and other methods of cheating, and television and other revenues generated through sports activities. It is a familiar story, and Weiler tells it relatively well. His approach is balanced and his tone is evenhanded, even when the subject does not deserve it.
His solution to the problems of Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League boil down to one piece of national legislation. "The only way to avoid a regular replay of the experience of the 1990s is to have Congress pass a law that bars redistribution of middle-American taxpayer dollars into the pockets of wealthy Americans like George Steinbrenner." He adds, "I hope my readers now understand that as fans we would be better off if our favorite sports had the combination of a salary tax and a stadium cap" (p. 345). That might help, although I am opposed to any restraint on the ability of players to receive whatever income they are able to negotiate for their services since they are fundamentally the stars of the show, but I only wish it were that simple! I very much question all the problems of the sports business could be cured in this way, and I must add that the devil would be in the details of any such congressional action and its ramifications might be strikingly different from what was intended. Witness the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act and how it simply changed the rules of the game; it did not appreciably alter the game itself. Additionally, the ability to pass legislation of this type in early twenty-first century America appears virtually nil.
While I found this book quite interesting and worthy of consideration, I was annoyed by the relative lack of academic rigor in the discussion. At no point, for instance, did Weiler offer detailed thoughts on the nature of the legislation that he believes is necessary. Additionally, the book is completely without scholarly apparatus, not even a selected bibliography, and I find this unacceptable in a serious work.

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How People Live Review

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(More customer reviews)I am VERY familiar with this book, having read it at night to my 11 year old son for months now! We just finished it. He loved it--he is a huge geography buff and was fascinated with the glimpes of so many cultures around the world. We both learned a lot about people and countries we had known nothing or very little about before now.
A few small things would have made this a much better book, however! I would have loved to have a small map on each 2 page spread about a culture, so that we could have seen exactly where the people talked about lived. I'd have liked very much to have some of the words in other languages spelled out phonetically, as I was often guessing wildly at how things were said. I also wish the book would have focused a little less on exotic and unusual cultures and a little more on more common cultures---the former was very interesting, but the latter would have given us probably a more realistic world view!
My sons are annoyed that I am writing so many complaints! They felt this was a wonderful book, and so did I---I just think it could have been even better!

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Olympic Media: Inside the Biggest Show on Television (Routledge Critical Studies in Sport) Review

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(More customer reviews)I had the pleasure of reading Olympic Media: Inside the Biggest Show on Television by Andrew Billings two months before the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Being a sports enthusiast and Olympics junkie, the only fix for my Beijing addiction prior to this book was the occasional Olympic Torch tidbit on the evening news or a visit to the official website of the IOC. Thankfully, Olympic Media came along in time to sufficiently whet my appetite for the largest sports spectacle in the world.
What Billings has accomplished in his examination of NBCs telecast of the Olympics is remarkable. He offers in-depth observations and analyses of the telecast by focusing on organizational processes, production influences, and viewer perceptions of this cultural (and often political) megaevent. In terms of cultural significance, the only other sporting event that rivals the importance of the Olympics is World Cup soccer. It is rare to find a study that explores the media effects process from inception (i.e., NBCs eight-year pre-production planning) to reception (i.e., viewer reactions to and perceptions of the Games). In just under 200 pages, Billings conducts interviews with the gatekeepers and storytellers at NBC Sports, performs content analyses of primetime coverage from the last 10 years of Olympic telecasts with a focus on themes of nationality, gender, and ethnicity, and analyzes the cultivating and agenda-setting effects of the Olympics telecast using survey data collected from viewers.
Chapter 1 opens with a historical review of the Olympic telecast. From the Berlin Summer Games in 1936 to the Torino Winter Games in 2006, he provides a review of key moments in Olympic telecast history. He concludes the chapter with sufficient rationale for this study (viewership, political influence, prestige, viewer attitudes) and his methods of analysis, and concludes with a preview of the remaining chapters.
Chapters 2 and 3 are quite possibly the most interesting chapters in the book because they contain interviews conducted with NBCs producers and reporters juxtaposed with relevant facets of the television production and narration process. Specifically, in chapter 2, Billings offers analyses and excerpts of his interviews with three producers and one director, most notably Dick Ebersol, executive producer of the Olympic telecast. Many questions concerning the evolution of the Olympic broascast are answered by Ebersol in this chapter, including decisions that directly impact viewership (e.g., Ebersol's decision to eliminate boxing from primetime). In chapter 3, Billings presents analyses and excerpts of interviews with seven NCA sportscasters including Bob Costas, primetime anchor, and Jim Lampley, the weekend/late-night anchor. For example, answers from Costas and Lampley to questions concerning "profiles and promotion" of prominent athletes that withdraw from competition or fail to win medals were illuminating and entertaining. Once again, Billings effectively synthesizes questions concerning the storytelling process with relevant, meaningful answers from a variety of sportscasters, many of which are former, multi-medal-winning Olympians.
Read more on this review in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Communication Studies, published by Marquette.

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Located in the United States, NBC (National Broadcasting Company) is the biggest and most powerful Olympic network in the world, having won the rights to televise both the Summer and the Winter Olympic Games. By way of attracting more viewers of both sexes and all ages and ethnicities than any other sporting event, and through the production of breathtaking spectacles and absorbing stories, NBC's Olympic telecasts have huge power and potential to shape viewer perceptions. Billings's unique text examines the production, content, and potential effects of NBC's Olympic telecasts. Interviews with key NBC Olympic producers and sportscasters (including NBC Universal Sportsand Olympics President Dick Ebersol and primetime anchor Bob Costas) outline the inner workings of the NBC Olympic machine; content analyses from ten years of Olympic telecasts (1996-2006) examine the portrayal of nationality, gender, and ethnicity within NBC's telecast; and survey analyses interrogate the extent to which NBC's storytelling process affects viewer beliefs about identity issues. This mixed-method approach offers valuable insights into what Billings portrays as "the biggest show on television".

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Sports In Society: Issues and Controversies, Eighth Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)I am currently taking a grad school course of Sports Ethics and we are using this book as a text. Coakley begins each chapter well using differnt socialogcal schools of thought as a basis for defining the each issue that is presented chapter by chapter. However, the second half of each chapter turns into his own personal treatise on what is wrong with sports in today's society. Although I do commend Coakley on having the guts to let his view be known, I don't feel for a book that is used as a text he presents the argument equally well on each subject.

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SPORT IN SOCIETY is the definitive text for the sport sociology course.Taking a global, issues-oriented approach to study the role of sport in society, this text encourages the discussion of current sports-related controversies and helps students develop critical thinking skills.

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Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers Review

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(More customer reviews)In response to "Truth Seeker"'s review, a few basic points:
1. Muslims are not ignored in the book. The data include a full national sample of Muslim and other minority religion teens. As the book explains, however, because Muslim teens are so relatively few in number, only a handful show up in any national sample. Nevertheless, detailed attention is paid to Muslim (and Hindu and Buddhist) teens on pp. 315-317, based on the data we do have.
2. The analytical categories used (comparing conservative, mainline, and black Protestants with Catholics, LDS, and not religious) is state-of-the art method in the sociology of religion. These are the major religious traditions in the U.S., and most readers want to know how teens in those traditions are faring. Of course it is possible to focus on specific subgroups (e.g., Catholic school attenders) and get more highly specified results (see point #4 below), but the basic comparisons in the book are entirely valid and routinely employed in sociology of religion.
3. The book makes perfectly clear that the teens portrayed in the Catholic chapter are not "typical" Catholic teens, but representatives of those Catholic teens who are not doing well religiously. They are explicitly situated in the overall and clear finding that Catholic teens as a whole are not doing well religiously. Of course there are some very solid, committed Catholic teens, but they are not the norm, they are the minority. Whether or not (truth seeking) Catholic readers want to hear that unpleasant fact is another story. My request is simply: Don't shoot the messanger because of the message.
4. The NSYR (www.youthandreligion.org) project from which this book comes has also collaborated with the National Federation of Catholic Youth Ministry and The Ministry Source to publish a special report focused exclusively on Catholic youth, which goes into greater depth in analyzing different kinds of Catholic youth. That report can be purchased at http://store.nfcym.org/store/merchant.mv. The Instituto Fe y Vida is also writing a book using NSYR data focused exclusively on Hispanic Catholic and Protestant teens.
I hope these points help to clarify some matters raised in Truth Seeker's review. I think a fair reading of the book shows that the charge of "LOPSIDED, BIASED AND ANTI-CATHOLIC" is simply false.

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Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture Review

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(More customer reviews)Sports are the object of such a rabid obsession in modern society that intense discussion of them rarely needs exceed wins and losses. Indeed, as Vince Lombardi's favorite saying went: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann don't reject the wisdom of that famous mission statement in "Gaming the World," but they push the boundaries of sports talk far beyond the information found in a box score.
Never before has the world been as globalized as it is now in the 21st Century, and never before have sports like soccer, American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey been as popular as they are now throughout the West and throughout the world. Markovits and Rensmann examine these conditions through a fusion of ideas about sports and about globalization.
They consider, for instance, how forces of globalization were able to turn to soccer from a game played by English schoolboys into a ubiquitous global language, and how "other footballs" like rugby and American football survived, flourished, and carved popularities of their own. Conversely, they examine sports as an agent of globalization and modernization -- how figures like Jackie Robinson were able to help dismantle oppressive forces in society by first deconstructing them on the playing field.
Markovits and Rensmann's appraisals, though, remain candidly honest. While the cosmopolitan soccer clubs of Europe have helped ease racial tensions, the authors aren't afraid to face the harsh reality that European soccer remains an occasional bastion of racism and violence. Likewise, they confront the fact that, while women's sports have enjoyed a massive growth in popularity (especially in the U.S.), they still attract a disproportionately small share of our attention.
Throughout, the authors convey a deft understanding and respect of the forces driving sports culture, sports industry, and sports fandom. It's also quite clear that they posses a firm comprehension of the work of their contemporaries and predecessors in the academic study of sports. If they are great sports scholars, though, Markovits and Rensmann are also great sports fans, and they communicate their ideas so naturally that sports fans should find the conclusions of "Gaming the World" quite intuitive, as if they knew them all along.
For students of sports, "Gamin the World" is an essential component of any collection, and for sports fans it's an eye-opening guide to approaching a familiar interest in an entirely new way. "Gaming the World" is such a compelling exploration of a global phenomenon that even those apathetic toward sports, after reading it, might find themselves tuning into a sporting event (like this summer's ongoing World Cup) just to see what all the fuss is about.

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Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.

Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.

Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

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Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an excellent compiliation of some of the best ground breaking research and writings on women in sport. It is helpful to read the discourses on women's bodies which helps us to trace the source of culturally biased scientific research agendas on athletes and on women specifically. Juxtaposed with other more familiar writings on these topics, the text becomes an all important marker for the next generation of sport and gender scholars.

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A spectacular transformation in women's sports has occurred over the past century in colleges, high schools, and recreational leagues across the nation. Gradual changes during the late 1950s and 1960s within the fields of women's physical education and amateur sport provided the initial energy for this transformation. But it took the rebirth of a grassroots feminist movement in the late 1960s and 1970s to catalyze the radical changes in women's athletic opportunities and attitudes toward female athletes. The assimilation of feminist principles into the broader popular culture solidified the belief that sport plays a positive role in the lives of girls and women. Political activists for women's rights codified this attitude with the passage of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, a law banning gender discrimination in educational settings, thus guaranteeing women's legal right to an equitable share of athletic opportunities and resources. Though the sea change in American women's sports is evident in schools, the media, and local playing fields, scholars are still in the early stages of fully examining the causes and impacts of this historic change. Women and Sports in the United States brings together scholarly articles, journalism, political and legal documents, and first-person accounts that collectively explore women's sports in America, with emphasis on the post-Title IX era.This book was published with the generous support of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University.

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