Reflections on the cultural paradigm

In many ways the whole idea of the cultural paradigm as a way of approaching the study of history is old news; and this statement says a lot about sport history. As a discipline, sport history emerged from the broad sweep of social history in the 1970s, a history that was concerned with the much talked about history from below. Yet sport history did not necessarily begin with those from below; indeed, one of the subject's foundation texts, Mangan's Athleticism, is very much about those from above (school-masters and their socially elite charges). The same is partly true of another great foundation text, Holt's Sport and the British. While taking a multi-class view of sport, Holt examined those upper class administrators and 'gentlemen', as much as he looked at the ex-miner turned Victorian sporting professional. 'Mainstream' historians did social history from below, and in their expositions of the marginalised - women, workers, immigrants and outsiders who had no voice in 'official' archives - they found new methodologies and approaches. These scholars, writing in journals such as the Social History Journal and the History Workshop Journal and working in cross-disciplinary centres such as Warwick, Chicago and Birmingham, turned to literary and cultural studies, to postmodernism, to postcolonialism, and to the cultural paradigm. This work dated back to the 1980s and was influential in my own undergraduate years in the history department at the University of Kent and later in my postgraduate training in Birkbeck and Oxford.