This will be a focused independent research project on one particular aspect of the history of sport.

This will be a focused independent research project on one particular aspect of the history of sport. It contains two parts: an historiographical essay (4-5 pages) that analyzes how three different scholars (or, in some cases, popular historians) have dealt with your topic, and a primary source analysis (3-4 pages) that examines three different primary sources about your topic. Both the historiography and the primary source analysis have to be framed by an interpretive argument! Within each sport, there are certainly key transformations and movements with broader social/cultural meaning. There are also, of course, questions about class, race, gender, commerce, nationalism, etc. that cut across sports and time periods. Whatever topic you choose, however, you need to make sure that it is something more complex than a simple narrative (e.g. the history of one team’s season, etc.)

TOPIC IS

• The bare-knuckle era (pre-Civil War), fights like Morrissey-Heenan (1858) Boxing