Book reviews: A new history of yachting; Skiing into modernity: a cultural and environmental history

Many years ago, a majority of histories of sport were simplistically dismissed by mainstream academics as written by ‘fans with typewriters’. From the 1980s however, historians of sport increasingly became a small but distinctive feature of university history and sports studies departments, though their work was largely rooted in social history and theory. From about the same time, this subfield began to develop its own specialist journals, societies and teaching materials, building on its links to mainstream history. More recently, it has widened its range of topics, approaches and conceptual frames, debated post-modern perspectives and adopted a more multi-disciplinary approach and a wider range of interpretative tools. The earlier concentration on popular, mass and male-dominated sports such as football, rugby and cricket has expanded substantially to incorporate minority, prestige, physically impaired and other forms of sport, while interest in topics such as gender, culture, representations, class, identity, ethnicity, diversity, space and place, environment and technologies is much more commonplace.