Heritage, public history, and social justice in sport and leisure

This chapter explores the relationship between sport, leisure, heritage, and social justice, using the United Kingdom and the United States as its geographic pivots. It begins by discussing different definitions of the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘public history’, including the author’s own. The chapter continues by situating heritage within the organisations where it is based, including sporting organisations, national governing bodies, and private philanthropic collections keen to emphasise exclusive and often exclusionary narratives of the history and purpose of sport (especially when paying lip service to inclusion). It also considers non-sporting museums and institutions reliant on the public purse, whose ability to tell nuanced, multi-layered stories about regions’ pasts is continually hampered by austerity and well-organised (and well-funded) political reaction. In the final third, the chapter discusses efforts both within and outside sporting organisations and heritage to address representation and offer alternative narratives of the sporting past. This involves research by curators, archivists, and even hobbyists on the participation of women, the working class, and minorities in sport, and how, even with scant and contradictory evidence, these new stories can sometimes offer powerful alternatives to established narratives. However, the author also questions whether the search for and memorialisation of ‘sporting firsts’ feeds another more conservative desire for an overly narrative history.