basketball 
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SOURCE: Oxford American
6/6/2023
Lady Vols Country
by Jessica Wilkerson
The author remembers Pat Summitt's championship women's basketball teams at the University of Tennessee as a demonstration of how sports "encompass a battleground for determining how gender manifests in the world, how women and girls can use their bodies, and who can access self-determination."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
3/21/2023
Historian's Book on 1970s NBA Shows Racial Politics around Basketball Have Always Been Ugly
by Jay Caspian Kang
The decade saw Black players become dominant in the league and assert their rights as skilled workers. Owners pushed back through the media, smearing the players as entitled drug abusers, as historian Theresa Runstedtler's new book explains.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
3/6/2023
The NBA Embraced Blackness in the 1970s—Moral Panic Ensued
Theresa Runstedtler looks at the NBA's key transitional decade as a time when Black players didn't simply change the style of play but demanded fair treatment for the value created by their skilled labor, following the ethos of civil rights and Black Power.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/12/2023
Why Won't Her College Honor "Queen of Basketball" by Renaming its Arena?
Luisa Harris didn't just lead the Delta State Lady Statesmen to three consecutive championships in the early 1970s. She helped integrate the basketball program and the college. Is that the reason why her name and image are so conspicuously absent today?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/31/2022
What Made Bill Russell a Hero
Sportswriter Jemele Hill writes that Russell was a model for later activist athletes because he rejected silence and sought to build solidarity with others.
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SOURCE: Slate
8/1/2022
Bill Russell's Greatness Was Unfathomable
by Jack Hamilton
"Bill Russell wasn’t just everything we should want out of people who play sports; he was everything we should want out of public figures, an absurdly gifted human being who understood there was a world outside those gifts and who set himself to help change it."
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SOURCE: CNN
8/1/2022
What Bill Russell's Troubled Relationship with Boston Tells Us about Racism
by Peniel E. Joseph
Russell always insisted on exposing the extent of prejudice and discrimination, and refused to settle for acclaim as an athlete as a substitute for respect as a person.
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7/3/2022
Excerpt: INAUGURAL BALLERS: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Women’s Basketball Team
by Andrew Maraniss
“Win this game,” Billie Moore told her team, “and it will change women’s sports in this country for the next twenty-five years.”
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/27/2021
How the Budding USA-France Basketball Rivalry Developed
by Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff
"Basketball diplomacy at the Olympics exposes the hidden ties that bind the United States and France together."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
9/9/2020
The Players’ Revolt Against Racism, Inequality, and Police Terror
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The radicalization of young Black professional athletes is a stunning development in this unfolding, raucous movement, one that demonstrates the sheer scale of racial inequality and a deep need to do something about it.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/1/2020
John Thompson Led Black America’s Basketball Team
Today's racial justice activism by prominent Black athletes has roots in the influence of the late Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson.
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SOURCE: Age of Revolutions
8/17/2020
Liberté, Equality, #ICantBreathe! Teaching the Age of Revolutions Using the NBA’s 2020 Summer Restart
by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
The slogans NBA players are wearing on their jerseys can help lead students to understand the objectives of 18th century revolution and the incompleteness of attempts to secure the rights and dignity of all humanity.
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5/10/2020
“The Last Dance” is the ‘Presidential Historian’ of Documentaries
by Jason Steinhauer
Viewers have embraced the ESPN Documentary "The Last Dance" as an escape and the best sports "fix" around. But its framing of leadership reflects a serious issue: the limits of how American media presents history.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/10/2020
Ivy League Cancels Basketball Tournaments Amid Coronavirus Concerns
The NCAA, which continues to prepare for its signature men’s and women’s tournaments, made clear that its recommendations have not changed, despite the Ivy League’s decision.
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3-26-18
March Madness and the Lengths People Have Been Willing to Go to Try to Reduce Uncertainty
by Chad Carlson
As this historian of the sport shows, it’s an old story.
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3-26-18
When Mississippi Basketball Was Integrated. (Sort of.)
by Luther Spoehr
It was in 1963. And for the first time the all-white Bulldogs of Mississippi State agreed to play an out-of-state team including black players.
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12-14-14
The Black Basketball Trailblazer Who Insisted on an Education
by Andrew Maraniss
“He wasn’t going to trade one plantation for another.”
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6-4-14
Review of Dennis Gildea's "Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton"
by Luther Spoehr
A real-life coach and a fictional athlete, forever linked.