ABSTRACT
Vanpaemel Geert, As an outsider to the field of sport history, He was genuinely intrigued by the observations made by the contributors, and by the clear resemblance of sport history with my own discipline, history of science. He could perceive the immense relevance of sport history to the understanding of present-day culture, yet he could feel the frustration caused by the fact that sport history had hardly attained an established academic status in university departments. Most contributions in this volume look primarily at what went on inside the discipline, and another volume would be needed to look at the place of sport history in the relevant scientific and professional cultures. The book shows that sport history has gathered a lot of momentum in the past decades and that it has outgrown its former isolation. The book is proof and a challenge to younger generations to take up sport history and claim a place for it in the twenty-first-century scholarly culture.
