Date: Wednesday, Feburary 5th, 2025
Time: 6:15 – 8:00 PM EST
Location: Heyman Center for the Humanities, 74 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027
RSVP here.

The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

by FRANK GURIDY

The “deep and impactful” story of the American stadium (Howard Bryant, author of Full Dissidence)—from the first wooden ballparks to today’s glass and steel mega-arenas—revealing how it has made, and remade, American life.

Stadiums are monuments to recreation, sports, and pleasure. Yet from the earliest ballparks to the present, stadiums have also functioned as public squares. Politicians have used them to cultivate loyalty to the status quo, while activists and athletes have used them for anti-fascist rallies, Black Power demonstrations, feminist protests, and much more.

In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.

Moving between the field, the press box, and the locker room, this book recovers the hidden history of the stadium and its important role in the struggle for justice in America.

About the Author

Frank Guridy is a Professor of History and the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. An award-winning historian, his recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. Other books of his include The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics and Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, and he co-edited Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America. His scholarly articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies. His writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post.

About the Speakers

Aram Goudsouzian is the Bizot Family Professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. His research is in 20th century American history, with a particular focus on race, politics, and culture. Most of his books and articles have examined the era of the civil rights movement from a variety of angles, though his most recent book is on the presidential election of 1968, and he is pursuing some projects in U.S. sports history. His most recent books include The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), and King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010). Recent publications have appeared in Modern American History, Journalism History, Journal of American Studies, and Study the South.

Kim Phillips-Fein is the Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is a historian of 20th-century American politics and political economy, and her interests include the history of political institutions and ideas, as well as the history of labor and capitalism and the history of New York City. She got her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1997) and her Ph.D. from Columbia (2005). She is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2009) and Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Her articles have appeared in many scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American History, Labor: The Working-Class History of the Americas, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Nation.

Pablo Piccato is a Professor in and Chair of the Department of History at Columbia University. He specializes in American history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century. Books include A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). He has been published in The Oxford Handbook of The History of Crime and Criminal Justice; The Americas, Dictablanda: Politics, Work and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, and Antropología, among many others.

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. She is trained in Architecture and American Studies, two fields that inform her scholarship, curatorial projects, art works and design projects. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Her research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to ISERP and the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.