Sport and History: Continuity and Change. Local Stories to Explain Global History

A collection of quality papers selected from those presented at the 2021 joint Congress of the European Committee of Sports History (CESH) and the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport (ISHPES) in Lisbon, Portugal, has been gathered to bring an array of contemporary perspectives on sports history. Hosted by the Institute of Contemporary History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and following the model of the 2020 Sapporo Congress, the organizers made it possible to present papers online with an interesting hybrid approach. The meeting aimed to explore the historical configurations of the sports field and its relationship with a broad range of political processes, a contested affair, and a source of multiple and conflicting arguments. In recent decades, a growing body of literature has focused on this relationship, and this collection of papers deals with some of these concerns. The chosen manuscripts address issues related to the Congress theme, ‘Sport and History: Continuity and Change’, and underline the good health of the global debate among sport historians with contributions from Turkey, France, Israel, Japan, Brazil, Austria, Spain, Italy, Poland and China and very different approaches from international relations to military history, from diplomacy to cultural history, from modernism to Olympic history. Initial contributions focus on diplomacy and sport. Modern sport has been defined as a key tool of political influence and a clear example of soft power inside modern political diplomacy.1 Its development has led to the concept of sports diplomacy as a way of making politics and seeking peace.2 The idea, often repeated throughout the twentieth century, that sports and politics are separate domains not mutually influential is not tenable anymore. Heather L. Dichter alludes to a diplomatic turn in contemporary sports history and provides for the diplomatic use of sport as a concept to deal with overcoming this complexity.3 Following Stuart Murray, sports diplomacy could be considered the conscious political use of sport, sportspeople or sport events for strategic purposes and on a regular basis.4 Kuruloglu takes up this issue discussing the role of sport as a tool of cultural diplomacy during the early Republic of Turkey after the First World War. New policies were developed in the