Sports, Memory, and More Digital History Tools
As my colleagues and I wait for responses from our chosen organizations about applying for our #explore1918 3,000 Steem reward, I'm taking another break from my usual content to write about my digital history pursuits.
Baseball season is back
That, plus the fact that this summer I'll be interning at a baseball museum, has got me thinking a lot about sports history. Sports bring together incredibly diverse groups of people, while also reflecting and perpetuating racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia in both actual gameplay and the overseeing organizations.
I wondered,
How does the way we remember sports history relate to those prejudices?
This may become a driving question of my Master's thesis that I'll write next school year. For now, I began to scratch the surface of this question with the free Google MyMaps application I learned how to use in my Digital History class.
I wanted to use a map to observe macro-level relationships between region and sports memory
To do this, I first made this map of each state with a sports hall of fame.
An interactive map is found here
The HOFs indicated by the purple icons were founded before 1970, and the red ones were founded after. I couldn't find an official founding date for the blue icons.
At first glance, there isn't an obvious pattern for either location or founding date. It feels like there are more HOFs in the southeast, while New England and the west are lacking. With the little research I have done on sports history this made sense to me, but again, it isn't a clear pattern.
I then made another map of the HOFs that have an actual physical location--many of the HOFs have annual banquets to honor inductees but no funding for a physical hall.
An interactive map is found hereThis second map shows a much clearer concentration in the southeast. Also most of the HOFs for physical locations were founded after 1970. This could be due to newer Halls having less time to establish a physical location, or it could reflect the dedication to sports history in the states that founded their Hall decades ago.
I need to conduct more research on sports and sports memory to explain the significance of these observations, but I do think that they could be meaningful. For my next steps I want to know how many of these HOFs are publicly funded. I think that there could be a connection between a state's priorities and its relationship to the prejudices in sport and sport culture.
Again, I'm just scratching the surface, but I'm glad that this free tool was available to raise some new questions to help guide more in-depth research.
What's sports culture like where you're from? How does your state/country/city/region remember sports?
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Cool post Joy. I see my state of birth, California, doesn't didn't feature. There also aren't really any hall of fames that I know of near where I grew up.
However, I have been spending a lot of time studying Cuba this semester. Interestingly, there was a baseball hall of fame (Salón de la Fama del Béisbol Cubano) established in Havana in 1939. It had inductions from 1939-1961 when the Revolution reformatted the baseball system in Cuba. In 2014, an organization met to induct 25 more athletes into the hall of fame for the first time since 1961.
Only last year (2017) did the state of PA mark this historic site in North Philadelphia (Jefferson Street Ballparks): "Baseball fields where both the first National League game and the first inter-racial game were played."