";s:4:"text";s:3505:" There is evidence in China that military forces around 2nd and 3rd century BC (Han Dynasty) played a game, originally named "Tsu Chu", that involved kicking a leather ball stuffed with fur into a small hole. Contestants fire from enclosed and covered shooting booths at targets in the background. This is of course unfair, but an inability to critique sport’s raison d’être (which is often used by its administrators to justify oppressive policies and practices) can perhaps foreshorten our critical distance and inevitably restricts the audience for our work to those who are fans of sport.Yet our audience is potentially much greater. The judges and scorekeepers are in the right foreground at a table under a roof. Let us take the history of sport beyond Sports History.Across the Anglophone world the humanities, and history in particular, are under attack as universities embrace a free-market model of tertiary education. Each target is flanked by a small hut in which a target marker would be concealed during shooting and would later signal by a staff or pole to the shooter and the judges the value of the hit. Sport both reflects the world we live in and helps to shape it.Sport is the great undiscovered country of the historical world. Shooting, the sport of firing at targets of various kinds with rifles, handguns (pistols and revolvers), and shotguns as an exercise in marksmanship.. Yet even in a more vocationally-centred department, the centrality of history and heritage to sport cannot be denied. The games played in Egypt and Mayan civilizations prove this. Most rules of tennis derive from this precursor and it is reasonable to see both sports as variations of the same game. Indeed, I’ve argued in Sport in Capitalist Society that the development of modern sport in the nineteenth century was part of an attempt to create a ‘masculine kingdom’ that excluded women and those males who did not match its hetero-normative ideals.Only historians of sport like us can explain why and how this is so – and it is this gives us a unique ability to explain the history of the world we live in today.
Just as important, it often lacks a comparative element, either in terms of other sports or the experience of other countries. The sport began to decline in Europe and the United States in the 1920s.Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.\r\n Access the world’s original book of answers.