The Rise of Genteel Sport

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
New Professionals ◽  
Financial Difficulties ◽  
Sporting Culture

This chapter focuses on the rise of “genteel sport,” a particular brand of sporting culture that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century as part of a broader effort to craft and unite a colonial elite. After detailing the unstratified nature of colonial sporting culture before genteel sport emerged, the chapter moves on to outline how business – not just social standing – united the investors in genteel sporting culture and how they aimed to inspire deference through the architecture and structure of new sporting events, including new venues and professional performers as well as new activities and new rules for older ones. Yet the chapter closes by citing the financial difficulties faced by the new professionals, and suggests that their commercial needs and investors’ own desires to win ran contrary to the magnanimous beneficence elites had intended to project through genteel sport.

A Revolution in Sporting Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Social Conflict ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Common People ◽  
Continental Congress ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Time Period

Chapter Two covers the same time period as Chapter One, but draws from newspapers and letters instead of financial records to emphasize the perspective of participants rather than investors. The result is that readers see how investors failed to create the spatial and behavioral distinction they desired, and so any attempt to claim exclusive gentility triggered aggravation and social conflict rather than awe and deference. This result was also influenced by the imperial crisis going on at the same time, which emphasized notions of “liberty” and “equality” and so made common people less likely to accept efforts to craft distinction in public settings such as sporting events. The chapter closes by examining how the imperatives of running a popular insurgency led the Continental Congress to essentially ban genteel sport as part of its Articles of Association in 1774.

Classical Reception Among the Women of the Eighteenth-Century Bluestocking Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaelle Walsh-Beauchamp
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Informal Education ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
The Temple

Eighteenth-century Britain saw a rich period of classical reception and allusions to antiquity in its literature, art, and politics. Among those who were influenced by the ancient Greek and Roman cultures were the members of the Bluestocking Society. Comprising mainly of authors, artists, and politicians of the elite class, it is its female members who have gained the most prominence in the subsequent study of the Society. While its most famous female members have been extensively studied through feminist, political, and literary lenses this work seeks to examine the classical influences upon the group. This paper will examine a mixture of contemporary literary works, paintings, engravings, and commissioned architecture, analyzing the classical allusions within these works and how these were used by the Bluestocking women to propagate their social standing. Additionally, the education of the Bluestocking women will be examined to see how certain women of the eighteenth-century made use of informal systems of learning to become as affluent in classical scholarship as their male counterparts. The Bluestocking women were able to use this informal education to become celebrated scholars. Major works analyzed within the paper include the personal letters of the leader of the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Sarah Fielding’s The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1778) by artist Richard Samuel, and representations of historian Catharine Macaulay as a Roman figure.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Urban Elite ◽  
Household Heads ◽  
New Yorkers

This book has examined how eighteenth-century New Yorkers, some of more credible social standing than others, challenged the standards touted by the urban elite. Many of those locked in subservient roles expressed their feelings spontaneously, without commentary. Wives, servants, and slaves rebelled against the restrictions that defined their lives and defied the rules that household heads wanted them to follow. Artisans debated substantive issues with members of the elite in the religious setting, and in so doing presented themselves as legitimate adversaries to the high-ranking men who governed church affairs. This conclusion discusses the ramifications of the small-scale cultural confrontations between New York City's commoners and gentlemen as the war of words between Americans and Britons escalated during the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Sporting Cultures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Men ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Early National ◽  
Cultural Mobility

The final chapter explores the experience of participating in mass sporting culture. It begins by introducing the notion of “cultural mobility,” a concept which describes how white men took advantage of both the accessibility created in the early national period as well as the re-introduction of standardized genteel and rough sporting spaces to challenge class stereotypes by moving easily between claims of genteel and raw masculine superiority. Political parties then drew from the cultural mobility at sporting events to appeal to the white male electorate through a new “mass politics” that continued to borrow heavily from sporting culture to emphasize democratic experiences despite widening disparities of wealth and hardening class lines. In the end, then, white men negotiated a sporting culture that rejected elitism but excluded others while crafting a reverence for wealth and a sense of equal opportunity. Because of sporting culture’s political salience in the white male republic, understanding this negotiation helps us understand not just the nature of sport but the nature and limits of democracy and power in the early nineteenth century.

A Mass Sporting Industry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Early National ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
National Period ◽  
Panic Of 1837

The political and financial potential of a commercialized sporting culture led to an explosion of sporting businesses in the antebellum period. Competition, along with a contraction caused by the Panic of 1837, led investors and professionals to reorganize the sporting industry yet again in the 1840s and 1850s. By re-establishing distinctively genteel, middling, and rough sporting spaces (after they had gotten muddled by the democratic accessibility introduced in the early national period), the backers and managers of sporting events specialized their enterprises and transformed sporting culture into the country’s earliest version of mass culture – a set of specialized, standardized, accessible, anonymous, commercial experiences intended to sell democracy to white men irrespective of their wealth or ethnicity.

They Will Have Their Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Cohen
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Early America ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Sporting Activities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Boundaries ◽  
Playing Fields ◽  
Class Divisions

They Will Have Their Game explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Drawing on unparalleled research into the personal papers of the investors behind sporting events, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activities as stages for securing economic and political advantage over others. The book tracks the evolution of this fight for power from 1760 to 1860, showing how elites gradually conceded their hopes for exclusive gentility and embraced a more democratic and commercial mass sporting culture while maintaining power by agreeing to limit access according to race and gender as well as incubating respect for wealth and offices won on the allegedly open and level playing fields of electoral “races” and the “game” of business. Compelling narratives about individual participants illustrate the negotiations by which sporting discourse and experience created opportunities for self-assertion across class, racial, and gender boundaries even as they also normalized economic and political inequality along those lines. In the end, Cohen’s arguments question the influence of ideas such as “gentility” and “respectability” in the standard narrative of commercial popular culture, and put men like P.T. Barnum at the end instead of the beginning of the process, unveiling a new take on the creation of the white male republic of the early nineteenth century that puts sporting activities at the center rather than the margins of economic and political history.

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