Four Histories about Early Dutch Football, 1910-1920: Constructing Discourses

<p>What is the purpose of history today, and how can sporting research help us understand the world around us? In this stimulating book, Nicholas Piercey constructs four new histories of early Dutch football, exploring urban change, club members, the media, and the diaries of Cornelis Johannes Karel van Aalst, a stadium director, to propose practical examples of how history can become an important democratic tool for the 21st century. Using early Dutch football as a field for experimental thinking about the past, the four histories offer new insights into the lives, interests and passions of those connected to the sport in the 1910s and the cities they lived in. How did the First World War impact on Dutch football? Were new stadia a form of social control? Is the spread of the beautiful game really a good thing? And why was one of the sport’s most prominent figures more concerned with potatoes? These stories of early Dutch football suggest how vital sport and history can be in shaping our lives, perceptions and actions, and why we need to challenge the influence they have today. This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here(.xlsx). </p>

History

Piercey, Nicholas

Europe

UCL Press

<p><div>What is the purpose of history today, and how can sporting research help us understand the world around us? In this stimulating book, Nicholas Piercey constructs four new histories of early Dutch football, exploring urban change, club members, the media, and the diaries of Cornelis Johannes Karel van Aalst, a stadium director, to propose practical examples of how history can become an important democratic tool for the 21st century. Using early Dutch football as a field for experimental thinking about the past, the four histories offer new insights into the lives, interests and passions of those connected to the sport in the 1910s and the cities they lived in. How did the First World War impact on Dutch football? Were new stadia a form of social control? Is the spread of the beautiful game really a good thing? And why was one of the sport's most prominent figures more concerned with potatoes? These stories of early Dutch football suggest how vital sport and history can be in shaping our lives, perceptions and actions, and why we need to challenge the influence they have today. This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here(.xlsx).</div></p>

<p>Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. </p> <p>While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.</p>

An Analysis of Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History (The Macat Library)

Literature & Fiction

Stammers, Tom

History & Criticism

Macat Library

An Analysis of Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History: In Defence of History (The Macat Library)

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