Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

What is sport? Who should play sport? Why should sport be played? How
should sport be played? Over the course of Canadian history, the answers
to these and related questions have varied enormously. This book
demonstrates that sport, in its various aspects, is a function of the
society in which is takes place. Sport, moreover, influences society in
turn; as Canadians saw what women could do on the playing field, their
image of what women were was affected.

Blood, Sweat, and Cheers—the sixth in the Themes in Canadian Society
History series edited by Craig Heron and Franca Iacovetta—is divided
into six chapters: “Blood” (changing definitions of sport),
“Respectability” (why sport is played); “Money” (increasing
professionalization), “Cheers” (sports audiences), “Bodies”
(women), and “Nation” (sports and nationalism). In making his case,
the author, a professor of history at St. Mary’s University in
Halifax, lost me only once. In the “Body” chapter, he notes that
historians concerned with this subject have been “strongly influenced
by the work of French social theorist Michel Foucault.” Although this
is no doubt true, Howell’s explanation of Foucault’s thinking (which
includes such sentences as “Foucault sees the modern world as one in
which power is associated with the disciplines associated with
rationality”) is not in keeping with a series designed for the
nonspecialist reader. But this is a minor flaw in what otherwise is a
clear and splendid piece of work.