Celebrating Canadian athletes and sporting history.

The cultural impact of sport on a nation is not slight. Famous for a Time explores a number of important, if not well remembered, Canadian athletes and the sports they played to help explain the nation?s complicated history, sporting and otherwise. It is an exploration that reveals the socio-cultural trends that have shaped Canada since Confederation.

Through the prism of some exceptional athletes, the prevailing attitudes of many Canadians about class, race, masculinity, femininity, and national identity are laid bare. Here, from the sidelines, we learn how these attitudes have changed ? or not, as the case may be ? over time.

From team sports such as lacrosse, baseball, and cricket to Canada?s cycling craze, track and field, and boxing, each chapter offers insight into an important aspect of the nation?s narrative. The winners and losers of Canada?s games simply mirror the larger questions that have faced Canadian society across three centuries.

• Two sport historians ask what the stories of Canadian athletes tell us about the narrative of Canada, looking through a lens of race and class and sexism
• For example, how Indigenous ritual Lacrosse became a team sport or the Baseball hall of famers who were descendants of escaped enslaved people or how boxing was used to stoke racial tensions
• Covers lacrosse, baseball, cricket, boxing, cycling, track and field
• Authors are both history professors at University of Guelph