1st Edition
Crafting Patriotism for Global Dominance America at the Olympics
In 2008 China plans to use the Olympic Games to remake its national identity in the global marketplace. In so doing China treads the path blazed by the United States. For more than a century the U.S. has used the Olympic Games to construct national identity, create communal memory, and craft patriotic mythology. From opening parades where the American team refuses to dip its flag in order to signal American exceptionalism to the closing ceremonies where the U.S. media trumpet that their team owes its medals not to superior athleticism but to the nation’s peerless social and political systems, Olympic Games have served as sites to bolster American nationalism. More than any other nation, the United States has politicized its Olympic participation. In the process a host of myths about American superiority in global encounters has emerged through the Olympics. In memorializing and mythologizing their Olympic teams Americans have revealed the contours of the racial, gender, and class dynamics that animate their peculiar nationhood. These essays explore the history of expressions of American national identity in Olympic arenas.
This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
- Prologue by Allen Guttmann
- ‘This Flag Dips for No Earthly King’: The Mysterious Origins of an American Myth
- Stars and Stripes at Cold War Games: The Strange Evolution of an American Myth
- Playing for a National Identity: Sport, Ethnicity, and American Political Culture during the ‘Melting Pot’ Era
- Return to the Melting Pot: An Old American Olympic Story
- American Ideas about Race and Olympic Races from the 1890s through the 1920s: Scientific Racism versus Egalitarian Ideologies
- American Ideas about Race and Olympic Races from the 1890s through the 1950s: The Rise of ‘Black Auxiliaries’ and the Decline of Scientific Racism?
- Johnny Weissmuller and the Old Global Capitalism: The Federal Blueprint to Sell American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s
- Olympic Games and Historical Imagination: Notes from the Fault Line of Tradition and Modernity
- Epilogue by JA Mangan
Biography
Mark Dyreson is an associate professor of kinesiology and history at Pennsylvania State University and is also President of the North American Society for Sport History.
