Public Historians at Work
Welcome to “Public Historians at Work,” a podcast series from the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, Texas. Our vision at CPH is to ignite an understanding of our diverse pasts by collaborating with and training historically minded students, practitioners, and the public through community-driven programming and scholarship. In this podcast series, we speak with academics, writers, artists, and community members about what it means to do history and humanities work for and with the public. Check us out at www.uh.edu/CLASS/cph or find us on social media @UHCPHistory. Executive Producer: Dr. Kristina Neumann (kmneuma2@central.uh.edu)
Public Historians at Work
Replaying American History through Sports: Frank Guridy
A history of sports can be a history of the United States. So says Dr. Frank Guridy, an American historian at Columbia University and author of the book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021). In his conversation with Dr. Mark Goldberg on April 13, 2021, Dr. Guridy explains how issues of race, labor, gender, and politics materialize in the stadium, whether it is segregated teams under Jim Crow or singing the national anthem before a game starts. As such, historians can use popular sports to enter the public arena, telling untold and silenced stories of marginalized communities to wide audiences outside the university.
For more on Dr. Guridy's work, see https://history.columbia.edu/person/guridy-frank/ and Twitter @fguridy.
The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph