Division of Social Sciences

In the archaeological record, size does matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:24:57 +0000

In the archaeological record, size does matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/14/2025 - 09:24

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature

If the archaeological record has been correctly interpreted, stone alignments in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge are remnants of shelters built 1.7 million years ago by Homo habilis, an extinct species representing one of the earliest branches of humanity’s family tree.

Archaeological evidence that is unambiguously housing dates to more than 20,000 years ago—a time when large swaths of North America, Europe and Asia were covered in ice and humans had only recently begun living in settlements.

Between that time and the dawn of industrialization, the archaeological record is rich not only with evidence of settled life represented by housing, but also with evidence of inequality.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of the University of Florida on a PNAS Special Feature focused on housing size in the archaeological record and inequality.

In a Special Feature published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scholars from around the world draw from a groundbreaking archaeological database that collects more than 55,000 housing floor area measurements from sites spanning the globe—data that support research demonstrating various correlations between housing size and inequality.

“Archaeologists have been interested in the study of inequality for a long time,” explains Scott Ortman, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of anthropology who partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of Washington State University to bring together the PNAS Special Feature. (Special Features in PNAS are curated collections of articles that delve into important topics.)

“For a long time, studies have focused on the emergence of inequality in the past, and while some of the papers in the special feature address those issues, others also consider the dynamics of inequality in more general terms.”

Kohler notes that "we use this information to identify the fundamental drivers of economic inequality using a different way of thinking about the archaeological record—more thinking about it as a compendium of human experience. It’s a new approach to doing archaeology.”

Patterns of inequality

Ortman, Bogaard and Kohler also are co-principal investigators on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project funded by the National Science Foundation and housed in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology in the Institute of Behavioral Science to create the database of housing floor area measurements from sites around the world.

Scholars then examined patterns of inequality shown in the data and studied them in the context of other measures of economic productivity, social stability and conflict to illuminate basic social consequences of inequality in human society, Ortman explains.

“What we did was we crowdsourced, in a sense,” Ortman says. “We put out a request for information from archaeologists working around the world, who knew about the archaeological record of housing in different parts of world and got them together to design a database to capture what was available from ancient houses in societies all over world.”

Undergraduate and graduate research assistants also helped create the database, which contains 55,000 housing units and counting from sites as renowned as Pompeii and Herculaneum, to sites across North and South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. “By no stretch of the imagination is it all of the data that archaeologists have ever collected, but we really did make an effort to sample the world and pull together most of the readily available information from excavations, from remote sensing, from LiDAR,” Ortman says.

The housing represented in the data spans non-industrial society from about 12,000 years ago to the recent past, generally ending with industrialization. The collected data then served as a foundation for 10 papers in the PNAS Special Feature, which focus on the archaeology of inequality as evidenced in housing.

Housing similarities

In their introduction to the Special Feature, Ortman, Kohler and Bogaard note that “economic inequality, especially as it relates to inclusive and sustainable social development, represents a primary global challenge of our time and a key research topic for archaeology.

In the PNAS Special Feature published Monday, researchers from around the world describe evidence of inequality found in archaeological data of housing size. (Cover image: Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes)

“It is also deeply linked to two other significant challenges. The first is climate change. This threatens to widen economic gaps within and between nations, and some evidence from prehistory associates high levels of inequality with lack of resilience to climatic perturbations. The second is stability of governance. Clear and robust evidence from two dozen democracies over the last 25 years that links high economic inequality to political polarization, distrust of institutions and weakening democratic norms. Clearly, if maintenance of democratic systems is important to us, we must care about the degree of wealth inequality in society.”

Archaeological evidence demonstrates a long prehistory of inequality in income and wealth, Ortman and his colleagues note, and allows researchers to study the fundamental drivers of those inequalities. The research in the Special Feature takes advantage of the fact “that residences dating to the same chronological period, and from the same settlements or regions, will be subject to very similar climatic, environmental, technological and cultural constraints and opportunities.”

Several papers in the Special Feature address the relationship between economic growth and inequality, Ortman says. “They’re thinking about not just the typical size of houses in a society, but the rates of change in the sizes of houses from one time step to the next.

“One thing we’ve also done (with the database) is arrange houses from many parts of the world in regional chronological sequences—how the real estate sector of past societies changed over time.”

The papers in the Special Feature focus on topics including the effects of land use and war on housing disparities and the relationship between housing disparities and how long housing sites are occupied. A study that Ortman led and conducted with colleagues from around the world found that comparisons of archaeological and contemporary real estate data show that in preindustrial societies, variation in residential building area is proportional to income inequality and provides a conservative estimator for wealth inequality.

“Our research shows that high wealth inequality could become entrenched where ecological and political conditions permitted,” Bogaard says. “The emergence of high wealth inequality wasn’t an inevitable result of farming. It also wasn’t a simple function of either environmental or institutional conditions. It emerged where land became a scarce resource that could be monopolized. At the same time, our study reveals how some societies avoided the extremes of inequality through their governance practices.”

The researchers argue that “the archaeological record also shows that the most reliable way to promote equitable economic development is through policies and institutions that reduce the covariance of current household productivity with productivity growth.”

GINI Project data, as well as the analysis program developed for them, will be available open access via the Digital Archaeological Record.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about anthropology? Show your support.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature.

Traditional

White

Initiative gives students a voice with hip-hop

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:39:27 +0000

Initiative gives students a voice with hip-hop Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/10/2025 - 09:39

Cody DeBos

Founded by a collaborative including �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholars, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project aims to empower Black and Brown youth through the medium of hip-hop

A Manual High School student sits behind a microphone, headphones on. Their world outside—which sometimes holds uncertainty, systemic barriers and institutional indifference but also encompasses the rich musical and cultural heritage of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood—fades away for a moment as a beat drops. As the student leans in, the cadence of hip-hop becomes an outlet to speak their truth.

For many Black and Brown youth in the greater Denver area, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project is more than a way to express their creativity. It’s survival.

That’s why the artists and educators behind the project are battling to keep the space alive.

Shawn O'Neal (left), an assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies, and Kalonji Nzinga (right), an assistant professor of education, are co-directors of Lyripeutics.

“We’re trying to provide these platforms of learning that we think Black and Brown students in particular really resonate with,” says Kalonji Nzinga, a �鶹��Ѱ�� assistant professor of education and Lyripeutics co-director. “In a way, we’re just building upon the history of creating learning environments based in a cultural reference point, based in our ways of knowing.”

Through storytelling and music production, young people in the Lyripeutics program gain an opportunity to share stories of their unique cultural wealth. But while the program has been a source of empowerment for many, it also faces funding struggles and systemic resistance.

What is Lyripeutics?

Founded by a collective of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholars, artists, educators and community organizers, Lyripeutics’ mission is to empower Black and Brown youth through a medium many connect with—hip-hop. The program is embedded in schools in the greater Denver area and aims to offer alternative learning environments for students who find themselves overlooked in traditional education systems.

“We don’t all learn the same, yet we have this system of education that’s been around for hundreds of years and is really geared for only one very particular type of student,” says Shawn O’Neal, an assistant teaching professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies and Lyripeutics’ founding member and co-director.

“It’s just not working for us. For many students. It hasn’t worked,” he adds.

Rather than using the traditional education system’s philosophy of rigid structure and standardization, the Lyripeutics program operates through collaboration and an evolving process in which students, teachers and artists co-create learning spaces.

“A typical day can look quite different depending on whether we have a producer leading the session or a lecturer on hip-hop history, or an actual MC helping create space for youth to do storytelling,” O’Neal says.

Students can also create and produce their own music in the state-of-the-art hip-hop studio adjacent to the Manual High School library in Denver.

“We collaborate with other hip-hop artists across the Denver area to develop the programming and to do the instruction,” Nzinga says.

At its heart, the program is about creative expression.

“We’re even working with students on exercises like field recordings of their environments and recording their neighborhoods and creating tracks and experiences out of those,” O’Neal adds.

Building confidence, one verse at a time

Through storytelling and music production, young people in the Lyripeutics program gain an opportunity to share stories of their unique cultural wealth. (Photo: iStock)

Those behind the Lyripeutics program know education isn’t just about what happens in the classroom, but what happens when students see their own voices amplified in the real world.

Recently, one group of high school students visited the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus to play original tracks on the university’s radio station.

“The folks who run the radio station were just blown away,” says O’Neal. “It was an enriching experience for everyone involved.”

“We believe that doing work related to the social context, the cultural movement that is hip-hop, allows young people to really express their story from their perspective,” adds Nzinga.

For many of the youth involved, the program is much more than an extracurricular activity; for some, it’s the first time they’ve been given tools, encouragement and a platform to tell their stories, O’Neal says.

“When we get to engage with the students, it’s normally within a place of creativity and joy. We aren’t there for a lot of the day-to-day things I know they’re going through, but we see and hear the expression of their frustrations and the various roadblocks they’re up against through their music and their performance,” O’Neal says.

Fighting to keep the mic on

For all its successes, Lyripeutics faces a current reality: Programs focused on BIPOC youth, particularly those challenging traditional educational models, are under an intense microscope.

“We are at this moment receiving so much resistance from multiple levels,” Nzinga says. “From previous and future funding situations to different regulations at the state and district level—it’s extremely frustrating.”

Despite widespread recognition of the program’s impact, Nzinga and his colleagues cite an uphill battle to secure funding. While institutions like �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute have provided crucial support, securing consistent financial backing remains a struggle.

But the pushback isn’t just about money. Nzinga and O’Neal attribute much of the resistance to a larger national trend of rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, making it harder for programs like Lyripeutics to operate freely.

“We claim we want this type of programming for students that they need, yet we have to fight tooth and nail just to get a dollar, when we see so much money funneled into things that seem to be the antithesis of community building,” O’Neal observes.

“We believe that doing work related to the social context, the cultural movement that is hip-hop, allows young people to really express their story from their perspective.”

The most devastating consequence? Students who should be at the center of the conversation lose access to much-needed programming, and their voices are silenced—sometimes literally. Despite receiving parental consent, Lyripeutics has faced institutional roadblocks when trying to bring student voices into larger discussions about the program’s success.

“We would really prefer to have those students speaking for themselves,” O’Neal says, “But we’re not even at liberty to say many of the things we want to say.”

O’Neal and Nzinga also know Lyripeutics isn’t the only program fighting this battle. It’s part of a system of community-led education that refuses to be erased.

Nzinga says, “Our program isn’t the only one facing these types of pushback.”

“A lot of times these resistance movements try to separate us. They make us feel like we’re alone in doing this work, but we aren’t,” he adds.

When asked how outsiders can support the Lyripeutics program, Nzinga and O’Neal didn’t point to a single solution. They emphasized the importance of solidarity, awareness and amplifying voices.

“I think parents and community leaders voicing their opinions about any of the positive effects our programming has had would help,” O’Neal says.

The road ahead isn’t easy. Yet, despite the challenges, Lyripeutics will be there to keep a beat playing and a mic on for its students, ensuring the next generation of storytellers and leaders will have their voices heard.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ethnic studies? Show your support.

Founded by a collaborative including �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholars, the Lyripeutics Storytelling Project aims to empower Black and Brown youth through the medium of hip-hop.

Traditional

White

Embracing all the joy in Mudville

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 17:16:36 +0000

Embracing all the joy in Mudville Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/03/2025 - 11:16

Jared Bahir Browsh

Even though Major League Baseball faces an uncertain future entering its 150th season, Opening Day still holds a special place in the culture and fans’ hearts

As Rockies fans make their way to Denver for the team's 33rd home opener Friday, we are reminded of the excitement and hope that accompanies every team starting the season and looking toward the World Series. Why does opening day mean so much to so many?

For many, spring and summer are marked by the cracking of bats and the camaraderie of the tailgate as fan hope is renewed and the losses of seasons past are replaced by visions of the World Series. Even as baseball faces a less-than-certain future, with viewership down and ticket prices way, way up, Opening Day remains deeply rooted in our collective memories. Why?

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

This tradition has been nearly 150 years in the making, with the first National League Opening Day occurring on April 22, 1876, in Philadelphia, with the Athletics defeating the Boston Red Caps. Since that first opener, the tradition and pageantry has only grown, with cities recognizing the day with parades and fans awakening from their winter hibernation to celebrate what has become an unofficial holiday in many cities.

One city where this tradition is strongly rooted is Cincinnati, home of the first recognized all-professional team in baseball, the Red Stockings. Manager John Joyce, who organized the original team in 1866, updated the Cincinnati franchise in 1875, and the team then joined the newly established National League (NL) in 1876.

Though beer has become a baseball tradition, in 1880 the Cincinnati Reds were kicked out of the NL for selling beer and playing on Sundays. Previous to that, William Hulbert, who had overseen the organization of the league after the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NA) disbanded, took several of the financially successful teams from the NA and established the NL with a number of strict rules, including a ban on alcohol sales and a ban on Sunday games, to address the negative reputation of baseball at the time—which included drinking, gambling and debauchery. The Cincinnati franchise ignored these rules, partly as an effort to attract German immigrants to the game, and was expelled, leading the team to go bankrupt and fold.

In spite of these challenges, professional baseball continued in Cincinnati, with Opening Day growing in prominence. The Reds have played almost every opening day at home since 1876, a tradition most likely rooted in their position as one of the southernmost charter members in the NL. The newly re-established Cincinnati Reds played in the American Association before joining the NL again in 1890 with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms (now Dodgers), expanding the NL to eight teams. Reds’ business manager Frank Bancroft began to intensely market Opening Day after he joined the team in 1892, establishing a tradition for not only the Queen City, but baseball as a whole, which just so happened to be the same year the NL allowed beer sales and games on Sunday.

Snow on Opening Day

An illustration of Opening Day at New York's Polo Grounds on April 29, 1886. (Illustration: Greater Hartford Twilight Baseball League)

The Opening Day tradition continued to grow after the turn of the 20th century, although weather, and sometimes even the fans, did not always cooperate. After the New York Giants went down 3-0 in their Opening Day game against the Philadelphia Phillies at the historic Polo Grounds in 1907, Giants fans threw snowballs on the field—including one that hit the home plate umpire, leading him to call the game in favor of the Phillies.

Attention on Opening Day increased when baseball fan President William Howard Taft threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the Washington Senators in their home opener in 1910. Twelve presidents have thrown out the ceremonial first pitch of the season, and many franchises have invited team legends and celebrities to welcome in the new season.

In 1920, the tradition of the Findlay Market Parade began in Cincinnati to celebrate Opening Day after the team won the 1919 World Series in spite of rumors that the Chicago White Sox had fixed the series—rumors that were later confirmed. Other teams built their own Opening Day traditions over time, like the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdale circling the field in St. Louis.

Opening Day continued despite two world wars and the Great Depression, with a number of milestones being established by the unofficial holiday. In the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Opening Day game on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, scoring the winning run against the Boston Braves. In 1974, while playing for the same Braves—who had relocated from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966—Hank Aaron tied Babe Ruth’s home run record at 714. The following season, Frank Robinson debuted as the first African American manager in baseball history.

Major League Baseball has maintained the tradition of Opening Day, even creating a unique logo in 2001, in spite of changes in the schedule. ESPN began broadcasting “opening games” the night before the official Opening Day in 1994, further establishing the noteworthy aspects of the day. On Opening Day in 1999, the first regular-season game outside of the United States was played in Monterrey, Mexico, with the Rockies beating the San Diego Padres 8-2.

The Colorado Rockies will play their 2025 home opener Friday at Coors Field in Denver. (Photo: Visit Denver)

The first regular season to open outside of North America occurred the next year in Tokyo; however, the games between the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs were scheduled the week before the official Opening Day, establishing the precedent that these early season international opening games would not be considered Opening Day games. The 2025 Tokyo Series took place between the Dodgers and Cubs on March 18 and 19, following several exhibition games in Japan—more than a week before the officially recognized Opening Day.

Opening Day traditionally took place on a Monday through the 2011 season, when MLB split the Opening Days of its 30 teams across two days to the last Thursday and Friday of March to avoid the World Series extending into November, as it had the previous two seasons. After returning to a Monday start in 2013, the league made the change to start the season on a Thursday permanent in 2018, with all 30 teams scheduled to play on Thursday, March 29.

As Major League Baseball begins its 150th season, many questions remain regarding the future of the sport. Two teams are playing in minor league stadiums due to the pending relocation of the Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays, and MLB and ESPN will end their media rights deal following the 2025 season, after the network tried to reduce its rights payments from $550 million to $200 million.

MLB continues to try to make games more attractive to younger fans by speeding up pace of play and by highlighting top stars like the L.A. Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Mets’ Juan Soto. In spite of this transitional period for the sport, however, one thing remains constant: the hope and excitement that Opening Day inspires.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about critical sports studies? Show your support.

Even though Major League Baseball faces an uncertain future entering its 150th season, Opening Day still holds a special place in the culture and fans’ hearts.

Off

Traditional

White

Picturing climate change in the West

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:57:22 +0000

Picturing climate change in the West Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/02/2025 - 14:57

Rachel Sauer

What began as a hobby for �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder economics undergrad Lucas Gauthier came together as a photographic portfolio documenting the already-evident and potential effects of climate change

Lucas Gauthier and his family moved to Colorado when he was in 6th grade, and after a decade of fairly frequent moves—both parents were in the military—this is where everything made sense: mountains for climbing, runs for skiing, trails for hiking and rivers for rafting.

They took some convincing, but eventually his parents let him venture out on his own—forays that grew longer and longer and took him farther and farther into the Colorado wilderness.

Lucas Gauthier, a senior majoring in economics, has photographically documented his adventures in western landscapes since he was in high school.

About four or five years ago, he began taking pictures along the way, usually on his phone. The photography wasn’t the point, necessarily, “but I found that, especially in Colorado, hiking puts you in some very beautiful places,” he explains. “I hike, and the pictures happen while I’m hiking.”

A through line for what had become a large portfolio of photographs emerged in spring 2024. Gauthier, a senior majoring in economics with a focus on natural resource management, was taking ENLP 3100—Complex Leadership Challenges, a class that requires students to complete three projects during the semester.

The first two projects were more technically focused, but the third emphasized creating something of personal value. So, Gauthier thought about all the places in Colorado that he loves, scrolling through both his memories and his photos. He realized that what began as an almost offhanded hobby was actually documenting places that would be or already were altered by climate change.

From that realization was born Climate Change in the West: A Photographic Journal, a multimedia project that incorporates not only data about things like wildfire, heat wave and drought risk and their potential for significant economic impact, but makes it personal with the scenes of incomparable beauty he has witnessed and documented.

“My interest in water specifically came from my interest in hiking and skiing and an interest in all outdoor sports,” Gauthier says. “When people say there’s going to be less rain, less precipitation, that’s a big deal for me.

“I worked and lived in Breckenridge, which is a tourism-dependent area, so if there’s not enough water, that’s weeks of ski season that are lost, and there might not be a rafting season, so that’s where you start to see the overlaps between how climate change is affecting natural systems and the actual economic impacts on livelihoods.”

Capturing what he sees

“My interest in photography has been in capturing this broad swath of environments that we get to play in—as a way to memorialize the experience for myself, and also to share it with others,” Gauthier says.

He took two photography classes in high school, neither of which focused on outdoor or landscape photography, “but I do think those gave me a good idea for how to compose photos and set them up, how to look for different lighting and visual elements,” he says. “They got me in the mindset of thinking, ‘This is something that strikes me, and I’ll see if I can frame it in way that works with what I want to capture.’”

Gauthier was also in high school when he began tackling ever-more-ambitious climbs and started working his way through Colorado’s 58 fourteeners, a goal he completed over the summer. Of those 58, he climbed at least 45 solo.

“(Climbing solo) is kind of a mix of preference and necessity,” Gauthier explains. “It’s easier when the only person you have to plan for logistically is yourself. And when you’re trying to beat lighting and thunder, it’s best to move light and fast.”

However, he never moves so fast that he can’t look around and, if he’s able, to capture what he’s seeing in a photograph. And he returns to certain favorite places, enough that he can compare them season by season or year by year.

“We’ve had a mix of good and bad snow years, but it’s been very noticeable when a particular area that usually has good (snow) coverage into May or June has already melted,” he says. “And there have been times when I’ve hiked through area and a few years later it’s a burn scar, which is a very visceral sense of change in the environment.

“Then there are little things like aspens are yellowing at a different date, wildflowers are blooming and stop blooming at different times. While it’s not as black and white a change, moving those transition points is definitely something that adds up in aggregate.”

Factors of climate change

Now, as he works his way through Colorado’s 100 highest peaks—he’s summited more than 80—and completes his bachelor’s degree, he still is conceptualizing what it all means. Many climate change models are forecast to take decades—if not centuries—to happen, but Gauthier is already seeing anecdotal evidence of them. What does that mean for how he exists in the outdoors and what he’s going to do after he graduates?

“I feel like there is a lot of doom and gloom, and I definitely feel that, but at the same time I am very much a person who feels like I have to say what I’m going to do about it,” he says. “With my area of emphasis in environmental economics, it’s about acknowledging that we have these issues and asking how we address them through actual, tangible means. For me, that means engaging in actual political and broader social processes. When I’m engaged in something, I feel less powerless.

“I think the main point that I wanted to communicate with this project was emphasizing how each of these different factors of climate change are integrated,” he says. “Fires affect water quality, flooding affects agriculture and all of it impacts places that I and a lot of other people love.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about economics? Show your support.

Traditional

White

How March went mad … for basketball

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:12:17 +0000

How March went mad … for basketball Rachel Sauer Wed, 03/19/2025 - 11:12

Jared Bahir Browsh

The big business of the annual college basketball tournament, continuing with the second day of First Four games today, has been more than a century in the making

Every year, as the seasons shift from winter to spring, college basketball fans throughout the country prepare to watch 136 men’s and women’s basketball teams battle for their respective national championships.

Although the tournament starts with the “First Four” games for the men’s and women’s tournaments, respectively, the first two rounds that are played during the first weekend of the tournament have become an unofficial holiday marked by billions of dollars in decreased productivity as fans watch the first 48 games played in each tournament—during which teams vie to extend their seasons another week into the “Sweet 16.”

In the modern media age, this has become a tradition in our sports calendar, but it took several developments over the last half century for March to truly become mad.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Basketball’s roots grew out of the college game, with James Naismith inventing the game in December 1891 to keep young men at the YMCA International Training School, which is now Springfield College, fit and occupied in the winter months. The game was soon introduced to women at Smith College, and by 1893 colleges and universities began forming teams—first playing against local amateur clubs before intercollegiate games began in 1894.

During this time, teams played under different rules, with some games featuring as many as nine players per side. By the turn of the 20th century, five-on-five became standard for men’s games, whereas women played six-on-six through most of the 1960s, with the last high school six-on-six tournament occurring in 1995 in Oklahoma.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was formed in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) before taking its current name in 1910. The NCAA was formed in response to the prevalence of injuries in college football; President Theodore Roosevelt called for two conferences comprising top college football programs to address the injuries and deaths occurring in the game. The establishment of the NCAA led to a decades-long power struggle with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for control of intercollegiate sports.

As the NCAA wrested control over football from the AAU, basketball continued to be loosely organized under the AAU, which organized the first tournament in 1898. Although the tournament did not happen annually until after World War I, the AAU did organize several tournaments for the 1904 Olympics, during which basketball debuted as a demonstration sport. There was an amateur tournament, a separate college tournament and several tournaments for high school and elementary school players.

A battle for control

The battle for control between the AAU and NCAA continued through the early 1900s, although the latter’s commitment to basketball was questionable through the 1930s. However, the NCAA did begin organizing rules committees and established its first championship, in track and field, for the 1921 season.

The first annual college basketball tournaments were organized in successive years with the NAIA tournament, organized by Naismith, starting in 1937, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1938 and the NCAA tournament in 1939. Coincidentally, the term “March Madness” was coined by Henry V. Porter, a noted coach and inventor of basketball equipment, in reference to the Illinois high school basketball tournament the same year as the first NCAA tournament. Sports commentator Brent Musburger first used the term in reference to the men’s tournament in 1982.

The NIT, which took place at Madison Square Garden, was seen as the premiere tournament through the 1940s due to the national media presence in New York City. Temple University defeated the University of Colorado in the first NIT championship, with the Buffaloes returning to the championship and winning in 1940 over Duquesne University. Because the NIT occurred before the NCAA tournament, Colorado and Duquesne competed in both.

Clemson players celebrate a win over Arizona in the Sweet 16 round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. (Photo: TigerNet.com)

The early 1950s featured two developments that further isolated each tournament, both involving the City College of New York (CCNY). CCNY became the first team to win both tournaments in the same year, with the championships of both tournaments occurring in Madison Square Garden in 1950. This double win led the NCAA to ban teams from competing in both tournaments in the same year.

Soon after, that CCNY team was implicated in a wide-ranging point shaving scandal, which involved bribery and match fixing. The school’s presence in New York provided bettors easier access to bookies and bookies greater access to players.

The NCAA held its finals in New York all but one year between 1943 and 1950, but after the scandal the championship never returned to Madison Square Garden, even as the NIT continued to call New York City home.

A growing NCAA

The next big developments occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s as the NCAA further established its control over the basketball postseason. In 1968, UCLA and Houston played in the “Game of the Century” in front of more than 52,000 fans in the Houston Astrodome. This game was a follow-up to the previous year’s semifinal matchup between the two teams, which pitted star players Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who was recovering from an eye injury, and Elvin Hayes. The game was nationally televised and accelerated college basketball’s transition from a regional to a national sport.

In 1970, Marquette declined an invitation to the NCAA tournament after it was placed in the Midwest Region, where games were played in Fort Worth, Texas, rather than the Mideast Region, where games were played in Dayton, Ohio—significantly closer to Marquette’s campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1971, the NCAA declared that any team that is offered a bid to the NCAA tournament could not accept a bid to any other postseason tournament.

In 1975, after several top-ranked teams missed out on bids due to not winning their conferences, the tournament expanded from 25 teams to 32 teams to accommodate at-large bids from conferences, establishing a selection process and the anxiety of the “bubble.”

UCLA player Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), right, snags a rebound as Houston’s Elvin Hayes (44) makes a leaping rebound attempt in what was called the “Game of the Century.” (Photo: Associated Press)

Four years later, in 1979, the tournament expanded to 40 teams but conferences were still limited to two total teams in the tournament. The 1979 tournament championship pitted Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team and Larry Bird’s Indiana State team and is still the most-viewed championship in tournament history.

The tournament continued to grow in 1980, adding eight teams and removing the conference limits. At the time, the Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Pac-10 and Southeastern Conference (SEC) were college basketball’s power conferences, with teams in the Northeast and New England playing in the amorphous Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC), which operated four regional tournaments between 1975 and 1981.

Providence coach Dave Gavitt saw an opportunity to organize a new conference with teams connected to major media markets, leveraging the growth of television through cable and syndication to form the original Big East. As the Big East began play in the fall of 1979, a small Connecticut network—the fledgling ESPN—began broadcasting nationally; soon the conference and ESPN became partners in each other's growth. As ESPN sought programming, it also began airing the early rounds of the tournament, which previously aired only locally as national broadcasters refused to pre-empt their regular programming for the early-round games.

The Big East increased college basketball’s media visibility on cable television, particularly during the week in prime time, and aided in recruiting as it became one of the top conferences in college basketball. When the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, three of the Final Four teams were from the Big East, with the eighth-seeded Villanova University defeating defending champion Georgetown University in the championship game.

Expanding tournaments

The first NCAA-sponsored women’s tournament occurred in 1982, with 32 teams facing off. Previously, the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW) had established the first tournament in 1969, when women’s games were still under six-player rules. The last CIAW tournament featured five-on-five rules before the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) took control of the tournament in 1971. Title IX, passed in 1972, accelerated the growth of women’s college sports well before the NCAA finally recognized the profitability of women’s basketball—10 years after the educational amendment was passed.

Kamilla Cardoso was named the NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player in 2024 after helping lead South Carolina to an 87-75 victory over Iowa, clinching the championship title. (Photo: Erik Drost/Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, the men’s tournament remained fairly static even as the NCAA continued to evolve. After the 1984 Supreme Court decision NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which found that the NCAA’s television plans violated antitrust laws, the NCAA was no longer able to limit how often football teams could appear on television, ultimately allowing conferences to sign their own media contracts with broadcasters and leading to a massive conference realignment that continues today. This, in turn, led to the NCAA basketball tournament becoming the most valuable media property overseen by the association.

The women’s tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1994, and the last men’s Final Four to take place in a basketball venue was played in 1996; subsequent events have taken place in domed football stadiums. The tournament expanded to 65 teams in 2001 to accommodate the Mountain West Conference receiving an automatic bid reintroducing play-in games to the tournament.

A century of madness

As the tournament approached the new millennium, fans were offered new ways to watch it. In 1999, DirecTV offered a premium package allowing fans to watch all the games through the satellite service, a feature previously only available in sports bars. The same year, CBS broadcast the Final Four in high definition for the first time.

In 2003, work productivity took another hit as CBS partnered with Yahoo! to stream tournament games for the first time through the latter’s platinum service. CBS launched its own March Madness OnDemand Service the following year, giving fans access to games outside of the CBS broadcast for $9.95.

Seven years later, in 2010, the NCAA announced it was exploring expanding the tournament, even announcing it wanted to expand to 96 teams. At the same time, the NCAA began negotiations with several media networks on a new media deal. The association settled on expanding to 68 teams, establishing the “First Four” games in which the four lowest-ranked teams that earned automatic bids and the four lowest at-large teams facing off in play-in games. This accompanied a new combined television deal in which CBS and Turner Sports agreed to broadcast all games on CBS, TNT, TBS and TruTV.

In 2021, after Texas Christian University center Sedona Prince, who at the time was playing for the University of Oregon, posted pictures on social media highlighting the disparity between the fitness facilities for the women’s tournament compared to the men’s, the NCAA conducted a gender equality review. This led to the women’s tournament expanding to 68 teams and the March Madness branding being extended to the women’s tournament. Many still feel the women’s tournament is undervalued, especially after the 2024 Women’s Championship earned higher ratings than its male counterpart.

So, every March hope springs eternal for 136 teams, but for dedicated fans, the madness has been more than a century in the making.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about critical sports studies? Show your support.

The big business of the annual college basketball tournament, continuing with the second day of First Four games today, has been more than a century in the making.

Traditional

White

Come for the cheese and pepperoni, stay for the lively political discussion

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 19:38:10 +0000

Come for the cheese and pepperoni, stay for the lively political discussion Rachel Sauer Wed, 03/05/2025 - 12:38

Politics & Pizza event March 17 will let students and experts discuss the relationship between business and politics

Many noteworthy images of the current political moment have included titans of business—in the Oval Office, speaking at a recent Cabinet meeting, gathered around the U.S. president during Inaugural events.

The relationship between business and politics has long been a fraught topic of discussion and, sometimes, contention—perhaps never more so than now.

If you go

What: Politics & Pizza, "The Business of Politics"

When: 5:30 to 6:45 p.m. March 17

Where: Muenzinger E0046

Free Cosmo's pizza!

Learn more

This will be the topic of the first Politics & Pizza event this semester from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m. March 17 in Muenzinger E0046. The discussion will explore the proper relationship of business leaders and organizations to politics and the political system.

The aim of the Politics & Pizza discussion series—which was initiated and will be moderated by Glen Krutz, a professor of political science—is to “encourage productive, substantive deliberation of specific topics, rather than rancorous and ideological macro-thoughts.”

“These events are meant to help �鶹��Ѱ��students sink their minds into key, specific political issues while they are sinking their teeth into delicious pizza!” Krutz says. “The other main goal is to have experts get the discussion started, but then to very much have a discussion between the students and one another and the students and the experts. The interaction piece is central, rather than a one-way information flow that sometimes we see at talks on university campuses.”

Politics & Pizza, which includes free Cosmo’s pizza, is modeled on similar sessions offered in Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Each session will feature expert speakers who give a few introductory thoughts about the session’s topic and then open the session to a question-and-answer with students.

The theme of the Pizza & Politics event March 17 is “The Business of Politics,” with panelists Scott Flanders, a former CEO of eHealth, Playboy Enterprises Inc., Freedom Communications Inc. and Columbia House Company and board member for Fathom Holdings Inc., Fellow Health and 890 5^th Avenue; Paula Hildebrandt, former vice president for corporate development and integration planning with FedEx Corp. and former economic research associate with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City; Taylor Jaworski, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder associate professor of economics; Midge Korczak, former executive director of the Boulder County Bar Association; and Brian Morgan, founder and CEO of Ranch Bucket Brands.

Upcoming Politics & Pizza events will focus on current topics including science and politics.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about political science? Show your support.

Politics & Pizza event March 17 will let students and experts discuss the relationship between business and politics.

Traditional

White

Counting hidden deaths at the U.S.’s most dangerous border crossing

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:23:17 +0000

Counting hidden deaths at the U.S.’s most dangerous border crossing Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/26/2025 - 11:23

Cody DeBos

�鶹��Ѱ��PhD candidate Chilton Tippin working to document migrant mortality in El Paso

With the desert sun beating down on the jagged trails of Mount Cristo Rey just outside El Paso, Texas, Chilton Tippin, a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the �鶹��Ѱ��, wipes sweat from his brow. His backpack is weighed down with bottles of water and food—not for himself, but for the people his research group expects to find hiding in the desert.

In the distance, he sees groups of migrants who just crossed the Mexican border, many of them exhausted and injured, pursued by Border Patrol agents on horseback and in helicopters.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder PhD candidate Chilton Tippin spent the summer of 2024 documenting the crisis at a deadly crossing point along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Tippin recalls this almost-daily scene on the mountain, a pilgrimage site that has become the deadliest crossing point along the U.S.-Mexico border.

He spent the summer of 2024 documenting the regional crisis. Though he originally expected to study the environmental impact of the Rio Grande, the unfolding humanitarian crisis was too important to ignore.

“My dissertation is about the Rio Grande, but since the river has been turned into a border and become heavily militarized, it has become a site for a lot of violence and death,” he says.

Yet, when Tippin tried to gather data on how many migrants were dying in the El Paso region, he ran into another problem: bureaucratic stonewalls. Many deaths, he discovered, weren’t being officially counted at all.

Without accurate data, the full scale of the crisis in El Paso is obscured, he says, and over the course of his fieldwork, Tippin saw how systemic failures, political pressure and logistical challenges combine to erase countless migrant deaths from public view.

He’s on a mission to change that.

Life and death on Mount Cristo Rey

“We would go up the mountain regularly,” Tippin recalls, “because a lot of the migrants and undocumented people trying to sneak across would be staged just on the Mexican side of the border.”

Mount Cristo Rey, the northernmost peak of the Sierra Juárez mountain range, is famous for the 29-foot-tall statue of Jesus on the Cross at its summit. With roughly two-thirds of the mountain in Texas and the rest in Mexico, it has also become a major hotspot for border crossings.

“When we would approach, often there were 20 or 30 people just sitting there in the desert with no shade, and it’d be 110 degrees (F). They would come running to us, and we would drop our backpacks and hand out 50 water bottles and any food we could carry,” Tippin says.

The migrants he and his team encountered weren’t just battling the elements. Many had endured days or weeks of travel, cartel-controlled smuggling routes and the fear of being caught and detained, or worse.

“Because of the whole process of being chased by Border Patrol in the desert, where the heat is up to 115 degrees, people are malnourished, depleted and exhausted,” Tippin says. “Then they try to swim across the river, and they’re drowning. Or they’re going out into the desert and getting lost and succumbing to dehydration and heat illness.”

Water bottles are placed beneath a religious display on the border between the United States and Mexico near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

The mountain itself is a paradox, both a path to safety and a trap ready to spring. The rugged terrain provides cover from Border Patrol and makes expeditions up the slopes more difficult, but it also means there’s no easy escape if something goes wrong.

“The mountain itself is such a surreal landscape,” Tippin recalls. “We often felt like we were in The Matrix or The Twilight Zone because we could be up there just kind of walking on the trails, and people are getting chased and detained and tackled.

“It’s also weird because it’s a religious place. But at the same time you’re moving through that landscape, people are running for their lives.”

The cartel’s grip on the El Paso region

For many of the migrants Tippin encountered, danger didn’t begin on the mountain. In Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, the Juárez Cartel has taken control of border crossings, turning human smuggling into a lucrative extension of its drug trade.

“I don’t want to push this idea that the violence is just a ‘Mexico problem.’ But the reality is that people wouldn’t be forced into these cartel-run routes if they had a safe, legal way to cross the border,” Tippin says.

Cartel smugglers, known as coyotes, lead groups of migrants across the border, often charging thousands of dollars per person. In the mountains, the cartel stations lookouts to monitor movements of migrant groups and evade the Border Patrol.

“They are just posted up on the peaks, watching for agents and guiding groups through,” Tippin says. “Border Patrol would try to menace them with helicopters, but they never actually go up there because it’s too dangerous.”

Even for individuals who make it safely across the border, the ordeal often isn’t over. Many are sent right back into cartel-controlled territory, where they face violence, extortion or death.

A helicopter flies over the rugged terrain at border between the United States and Mexico near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

“That’s the deadly dynamic,” Tippin says. “People cross, they get pushed back and then they get extorted again. Women get assaulted. Families get separated. And they keep trying, because what choice do they have?”

The deaths no one wants to count

When the official numbers of migrant deaths didn’t match what Tippin was seeing on the ground, he quickly realized documenting the crisis would be harder than expected.

“I went through the whole summer filing open records requests, and I was told, ‘We don’t count migrants,’” he recalls. “Then when I tried to get autopsy reports, they said that if I wanted to see the records of drowning victims, it would cost over $4,000. And if I wanted a broader dataset—covering deaths in the desert as well—I got a bill for over $100,000.”

Tippin notes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reporting rules can be obscure, which may lead to underreporting. If a migrant drowns in the El Paso canals or is found in the desert by local first responders, the Texas National Guard or civilians, they aren’t counted in the official data. If they die in a hospital after being rescued, they also don’t make the list. Even if remains are discovered by CBP personnel but the person was not in custody, guidelines state the death isn’t reportable.

As a result, the official data can be off by hundreds—if not thousands—of deaths.

This isn’t just an oversight, Tippin notes. It’s part of a pattern. No More Deaths, a volunteer organization, exposed years of under-counted fatalities, with actual migrant deaths sometimes exceeding CBP’s reports by two to four times.

For Tippin, the answer to why this happens is simple: Acknowledging the full scale of the crisis would shed light on the deadly consequences of U.S. border policies.

“I think that the deaths go uncounted because it’s inconvenient for the whole political and bordering apparatus to have it be known that, as a consequence of their policies and their practices, hundreds of people are dying in the United States, in the deserts and in the rivers that form the border,” he says.

Fighting for the truth

Despite the resistance, Tippin and several grassroots organizations aren’t giving up the fight. They’re using the limited data they have, as well as anecdotal fieldwork, to push for policy changes, local resolutions and new initiatives aimed at tracking and preventing migrant deaths.

Clothing and water bottles left at shady spot on the United States-Mexico border near El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

“It’s such a preventable public health trend,” he says, “and the way we attempt to address problems such as these is to gather data on them.

“We need to make what’s happening apparent and use the data to strategically implement interventions that could help reverse this alarming and tragic trend.”

One organization in Tucson, Arizona, Humane Borders, is using this approach. It works directly with the local medical examiner’s office to gather precise data on migrant deaths. That data is then used to strategically place water stations in high-risk areas.

Tippin and others want to replicate that success in El Paso, but without government cooperation, progress is slow.

“The medical examiner’s office in Tucson works with humanitarian groups,” he explains. “In El Paso, they won’t even meet with us. That’s the difference.”

But activists like Tippin aren’t waiting for permission. They continue to document deaths, advocate for policy changes and pressure local officials to increase transparency.

Recently, Tippin and his research team went before the El Paso County commissioners, pushing them to acknowledge the crisis and demand more transparency from the medical examiner’s office.

“We recently had them pass a resolution decrying all the deaths in El Paso. It’s a step in the right direction, but we need more than words—we need action,” he says.

In the El Paso region, migrants continue to suffer and die from preventable causes. The work to help them is slow, and the resistance is strong. Yet Tippin and others refuse to back down because, ultimately, it’s not about numbers.

“These aren’t just statistics,” he says. “These are people. And until we start treating them as such, nothing is going to change.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about anthropology? Show your support.

�鶹��Ѱ��PhD candidate Chilton Tippin working to document migrant mortality in El Paso.

Traditional

White

Top photo: Chilton Tippin

Nationalism and diplomacy are inherent to international sporting events

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:48:23 +0000

Nationalism and diplomacy are inherent to international sporting events Rachel Sauer Fri, 02/21/2025 - 10:48

Jared Bahir Browsh

The International Cricket Council Champions Tournament, beginning this week, highlights how national rivalries and geopolitical tensions can meet on playing fields

Courses in the Critical Sports Studies program in the Department of Ethnic Studies often start with the Great Sports Myth, a term coined by Jay Coakley, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. The myth is that sports are inherently good, and most experiences in sports are positive and do not need to be studied critically.

In combating this myth, we examine sporting nationalism with the playing field serving as a symbolic battleground between nations. As Pakistan prepares to co-host the International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Tournament beginning this week, the nation's nationalistic rivalry with India comes to the forefront and reminds us that the competition on the field is often reflective of political tensions off of it.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

India and Pakistan’s political tensions date back to the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, although ethnic and religious tensions predate the end of Britain’s colonization of the region. India has been a member of the ICC since 1926, with Pakistan joining the ICC soon after independence in 1952.

Sporting relations between the nations have faced a number of stoppages, while other countries have canceled test matches because of threats and actual violence against cricket teams, particularly in Pakistan.

The New Zealand cricket team canceled their remaining 2002 matches in Pakistan after a suicide bomb outside of their Karachi hotel, while other countries like Australia refused to tour due to similar concerns. In 2009, the Sri Lankan cricket team’s bus was fired on in Lahore during their test tour, which was scheduled after India pulled out of Pakistan following the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. As a result, Pakistan lost the opportunity to co-host the 2011 ICC World Cup; the 2025 ICC Champions Tournament is the first international cricket tournament to be hosted by Pakistan since the 1996 ICC World Cup. India's refusal to play in Pakistan led to UAE being named as a co-host for India’s matches in the tournament, exemplifying continued tensions between the nations.

Yet diplomacy has been fostered through sport as well, including the peace initiatives of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which led to the first matches between the nations in Pakistan in 15 years in 1999 and the Friendship Cups in Canada in the 1990s and 2000s.

Colonization and sporting tensions

Colonization has been at the core of sporting tensions between dozens of nations, including Britain and members of the Commonwealth like Ireland and Australia. Ireland in particular has used international sporting events as a forum for protest against Britain—most famously at the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, Greece. After being denied the gold medal in what many felt was a biased ruling by a judge from the United States, which followed the decision to force Irish athletes to compete on behalf of the United Kingdom, track and field athlete Peter O’Connor scaled a flag pole and unfurled an Erin Go Bragh flag, a symbol of the movement for Irish home rule.

The Olympics also have long been a nexus for sporting nationalism. One of the most distinct examples of this was at the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. In spite of rising concerns over antisemitism under Hitler, the United States, led by USOC President Avery Brundage, and others agreed not to boycott the games in exchange for Nazi Germany suspending antisemitic messaging and the full enactment of the Nuremberg Laws until after the games.

Adolf Hitler saw the 1936 Summer Olympic Games as a forum to display Aryan supremacy through victory and spectacle, which included introducing the torch relay. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Hitler saw the games as a forum to display Aryan supremacy through victory and spectacle. Television was introduced at the games along with the torch relay and the opening ceremony as an ostentatious show. The entire games were a primary example of “sportwashing,” which uses sport to improve public opinion of a nation or group.

Much like the India-Pakistan rivalry, a number of other geopolitical tensions have played out on various sporting fields and courts around the world. George Orwell published “The Sporting Spirit” in December 1945, a few months after the end of World War II, warning of the use of sport to encourage hyper-nationalism. Orwell was particularly critical of the Stalin regime’s use of sport to exhibit the Soviet Union and communism’s “superiority” over capitalism after the soccer team FC Dynamo Moscow toured Britain.

In 1952, the Soviet Union participated in its first Summer Olympic Games, setting off decades of displays of Cold War sporting nationalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but particularly exemplified by the competition between the USSR and the United States.

The Olympics became the largest stage for nationalistic competition. Every four years, the Cold War rivalries played out on the global stage of the Summer and Winter Olympics. Some of the most famous moments in Olympic history include the controversial end of the 1972 Olympic basketball final, during which the Soviet Union beat the U.S. team by one point under questionable rule interpretations, and the 1980 Miracle on Ice in the semifinal of the ice hockey tournament, when amateur U.S. players defeated the Soviet Union.

Both events exemplified the rivalry between these superpowers. The 1972 Olympics also included the tragic terrorist attack by Black September militants, leading to the murder of 11 Israeli athletes—an example of how ethnic-nationalism, sport and violence can intersect.

Boycott and protest

Boycotting sporting events and protest actions during competition have also been responses to various forms of nationalism and political tensions. The pending boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow by the United States intensified the attention on the competition between the USSR and the United States in Lake Placid during the Winter Games that year.

Recently, hockey reemerged as a forum for nationalism as the United States and Canada faced off twice in the National Hockey League (NHL)-run 4 Nations Face-Off. The tournament was limited to NHL players, so the teams were not technically the national teams of the countries included in the tournament. It did feature four of the five countries with the largest representation in the NHL (Russia was excluded due to the invasion of Ukraine), with the league leveraging nationalistic feelings between Finland and Sweden and United States and Canada. The heightened tension between the North American teams was due, in part, to comments by U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the annexation our northern neighbors. This may serve as a preview of the heightened nationalism around the 2026 Olympic men’s and women’s ice hockey tournaments, especially if Russian athletes are permitted to compete.

U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith (first place) and John Carlos (third place) raised their fists to protest U.S. segregation and racism during the medical ceremony for the 200-meter sprint at the 1968 Summer Olympics; Australian sprinter Peter Norman (second place) wore a badge for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. (Photo: Angelo Cozzi/Mondadori Publishers)

The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries in turn boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The 1980 boycott was triggered by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

White nationalism and racial discrimination have also been a frequent motivator for protest and boycotts. The Olympic Project for Human Rights promoted a boycott of the 1968 games in Mexico City, with several athletes—including Kareem Abdul Jabbar—deciding not to go based on continuing discrimination of Blacks in the United States, lack of African American representation on the coaching staffs of Olympic teams, Muhammad Ali’s loss of his heavyweight championship due to his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War and apartheid policies in South Africa and Rhodesia.

Track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos did decide to compete but famously raised their fists in protest after winning gold and bronze respectively in the 200 meters.

Apartheid policies also led to the South African Olympic Committee being expelled from the IOC in 1970. Prior to South Africa’s expulsion, several other organizations had banned the nation from hosting events as far back as 1934 due to their policies forbidding non-white participants to compete. After the New Zealand rugby team toured South Africa in 1976, 29 mostly African nations boycotted the Montreal Games that same year after the IOC refused to ban New Zealand.

This put pressure on Commonwealth countries to adopt the Gleneagles Agreement to expand the sporting boycott of South Africa. Taiwan also boycotted the 1976 games the day before the Opening Ceremony after the Canadian government’s refusal to recognize their nation as the Republic of China.

Sports like cricket and football are important cultural experiences in countries like Pakistan and India, but their presence is evidence of those countries’ colonial past and of nationalism emanating from the British Empire. Most British colonies around the world adopted the sport soon after occupation, serving as historical examples of cultural imperialism.

Since international competition started in the 19th century, sports like cricket and events like the World Cup can simultaneously bring people together and promote community while also inflaming nationalistic tensions. For over 70 years, the intense cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan has done both.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about critical sports studies? Show your support.

The International Cricket Council Champions Tournament, beginning this week, highlights how national rivalries and geopolitical tensions can meet on playing fields.

Traditional

White

National Bank Stadium in Karachi, Pakistan (Photo: Baseer Piracha/Wikimedia Commons)

Black History Month celebration emphasizes building the ‘beloved community’

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:07:13 +0000

Black History Month celebration emphasizes building the ‘beloved community’ Rachel Sauer Mon, 02/03/2025 - 15:07

Rachel Sauer

While speakers acknowledged the change and uncertainty of the moment, they encouraged hope and the importance of continuing to work toward justice

The afternoon began with a karibu, the Swahili word for “welcome”—not just to the Glenn Miller Ballroom or the �鶹��Ѱ�� campus, but to the beloved community “where everybody is included and nobody is excluded,” said Reiland Rabaka, founder and director of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), in opening the CAAAS Day Black History Month celebration Saturday afternoon.

The celebration came, as several of the speakers acknowledged, during a time of great change, when many are feeling the anxiety that often accompanies uncertainty.

�鶹��Ѱ��President Todd Saliman (left) and Reiland Rabaka, Center for African and African American Studies founder and director, emphasized the importance of compassion in the present moment.

“I have spent many decades watching progress and regress,” said �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz. “We seem to step forward and then back and then forward again.”

In emphasizing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Schwartz noted that the arc “is not smooth like a rainbow,” but rough and jagged. “The arc does not bend on its own, people bend the arc. Collectively, we bend the arc toward justice.”

Todd Saliman, president of the University of Colorado, told those in attendance that “we are not changing anything until we are required to do so by a lawful order. We’ll keep our eye on the ball and continue to do our work. At this point, there’s very little we’ve been required to do lawfully.”

Saliman added that the University of Colorado remains committed to all of Colorado and encouraged people to “approach each other with compassion right now.”

�鶹��Ѱ��Regent Wanda James, the second Black woman and third Black regent in the history of CU, was forceful in pointing out the lack of Black leadership within the �鶹��Ѱ��system, while Annett James, president of the NAACP of Boulder County, emphasized the importance of accurately told history during Black History Month.

“History must be approached as a discipline rooted in fact,” James said, “not interpreted by those who wrote it.”

Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, while acknowledging the “struggle, setback and oppression” in Boulder’s history, said that “in the days and years to come, we will continue to build the beloved community here in Boulder.”

Carrying the theme of building the beloved community, Rabaka emphasized that “we are going to keep doing this and we shall not be moved.”

Nandi Pointer (right), a PhD student in the College of Media, Communication and Information, performs with her brother, Shegun Pointer.

�鶹��Ѱ��Regent Wanda James (center, black baseball cap) observed that "this is a deep Black History Month for us for a lot of reasons."

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz emphasized that the "arc (of the moral universe) does not bend on its own, people bend the arc."

Denver musician Enmanuel Alexander performs at the CAAAS Day Black History Month celebration.

Reiland Rabaka, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of ethnic studies, said that in the work of building the beloved community, "we are going to keep doing this and we shall not be moved.”

Angel Anderson (left) and Tyreis Hunt (white shirt), both MFA students in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, and Constance Harris, an MFA graduate from the department, perform with Parris Fleming (on trumpet).

Denver musician Parris Fleming (left, on trumpet) performed with (left to right) Tyreis Hunt, Constance Harris and Angel Anderson; Hunt and Anderson are MFA students in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, and Harris is an MFA graduate from the department.

While speakers acknowledged the change and uncertainty of the moment, they encouraged hope and the importance of continuing to work toward justice.

Traditional

White

Breaking the color barrier in baseball leadership

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:01:20 +0000

Breaking the color barrier in baseball leadership Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/30/2025 - 12:01

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years after Frank Robinson became the first Black manager in Major League Baseball, the league is struggling with a significant decline in Black players and leaders

As Black History Month begins Feb. 1 and Major League Baseball celebrates the 50th anniversary of Frank Robinson making his debut as the first Black manager, the sport is at a point of introspection with the lowest number of African Americans players in Major League Baseball since the 1950s.

The milestone is both a reminder of how far baseball came since segregation and how delicate inclusion efforts are in baseball and other institutions in the United States.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

As the United States emerged from World War II, Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow laws continued to keep the country largely segregated. The war, however, was also a turning point for African Americans, who demonstrated that their service was of equal value to others who fought in the war.

One such soldier was Jackie Robinson, the first athlete to letter in four sports at UCLA. His teammates Kenny Washington and Woody Strode broke the color barrier in the NFL in 1946, while he did the same in baseball the following year—seven years before Brown v. Board of Education determined that “separate but equal” thresholds for segregation were unconstitutional. Jackie Robinson’s last season as a player was 1956, the same season a young Frank Robinson debuted with the Cincinnati Reds.

In 1972, the Reds played the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. By that point, Frank Robinson had been traded twice and spent the season playing for Jackie Robinson’s former team, the Dodgers.

During Game 2 of the series in Cincinnati, Jackie Robinson was honored 25 years after breaking the color barrier in baseball. During his speech accepting the honor, he appealed to MLB leaders to hire the first Black manager, an opportunity he never got despite his expressed desire to manage a team. Jackie Robinson died nine days after his speech—Oct. 24, 1972—never seeing Frank Robinson hired as the first Black player-manager two years later.

Robinson was traded to Cleveland during the 1974 season after openly campaigning for the manager position with the Dodgers. Cleveland was the first American League team to sign a Black player in 1947, Larry Roby, and broke ground again 28 years later by hiring Robinson. He was the first player to win MVP in both the National and American League, but had a rocky tenure with the team, often being pushed to play when he wanted to focus on managing and butting heads with the star player, Gaylord Perry. He did lead the team to its first winning record in eight years in 1976, the last season he played, before being fired during the following season.

Inclusive Sports Summit

Inclusive Sports Summit

We change the game: Embracing the value of inclusive sports and recreation

When: 9 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 5

Where: Dal Ward Athletic Center and Main Student Recreation Center

During this summit participants will

Identify challenges, opportunities and best practices for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion work as practitioners and supporters.
Learn tangible takeaways to build bridges and build unity across similarities and differences.
Build skills and practice techniques for addressing inequities to help increase student retention, engagement and success.
Connect with departments and programs across campus that are available to support students, staff and faculty.

The Inclusive Sports Summit is free and open to faculty, staff, students and community members.

Robinson went on to manage the San Francisco Giants and his former team, the Baltimore Orioles, winning manager of the year in 1989. He was fired from the Orioles during the 1991 season—the year Major League Baseball had the highest percentage of African American players in the league, 18% of all players. The following season, Cito Gaston became the first African American manager to win a World Series.

Robinson continued to work in the league office after his time with the Orioles, returning to the dugout after being tapped by MLB to manage the Montreal Expos, which the league owned at the time. The team moved to Washington D.C. in 2005 and his final season as manager was the first season for the newly founded Washington Nationals.

Declining youth participation

The dearth of opportunities for African Americans to coach and assume leadership positions in sports is not new; however, baseball has seen the most precipitous drop in participation, down to 6% during the 2024 season.

Contributing to this drop is the lack of African Americans in leadership positions, with only two African American managers, Ron Washington (Angels) and Dave Roberts (Dodgers), and one general manager, Dana Brown (Astros). In spite of these paltry numbers, three of the last five World Series winners have been led by African American managers.

The numbers are even worse in college baseball, with only 5% of players and 3% of managers in Division I identifying as African American in 2024; of these 26 managers, 17 were from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The lack of visible leadership affects scouting, mentorship and even participation when players cannot see a career in the sport they love if they do not make it to the major leagues.

The low numbers of African American athletes in the college pipeline to the major leagues is only one of the reasons for the continued decline of African Americans in professional baseball. Like many sports, the privatization of youth sports is forcing many lower- and even middle-income families to reconsider their children’s participation in baseball. Local governments and schools have slashed recreation and athletic budgets, leading to more expensive sports like baseball to be cut, which in turn leads to a higher reliance on private leagues.

In 1975, Frank Robinson became Major League Baseball's first Black manager, assuming the role with the Cleveland Indians. (Photo: Jeff Robbins/Associated Press)

Many families ultimately balk at the cost of playing baseball, steering their children into more accessible sports as youth and high school baseball is increasingly privatized. The relatively low number of Division I baseball scholarships (11.7 maximum per team) and programs (300) compared to basketball (13 maximum scholarships across 352 schools) and especially football with 133 teams at the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level, 128 teams at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level and with 85 maximum scholarships per team in FBS and 63 per team maximum in FCS. This also leads some families to encourage their children to focus on other sports to earn a college scholarship.

Even if amateur baseball players get drafted and signed, minor league salaries are so low that the same issues can arise that exist in youth baseball: players who cannot afford to remain in the sport. Minimum salaries are between just under $20,000 and $40,000 depending on the level, which is a significant increase from 2022, when minor league players unionized and negotiated a raise from a minimum salary between $4,800 and $17,500.

Salary expectations have led many scouts to focus on international players, particularly from Latin America, where teams will make verbal agreements with children as young as 12 in spite of the fact that teams technically cannot sign players until they are 16. MLB turns a blind eye to these agreements that often push children as young as 10 from countries like the Dominican Republic to leave school to pursue baseball. These players may be given performance-enhancing drugs to make them look more mature and artificially improve their athleticism. These players are ripe for exploitation, including lower salaries since they are beholden to Major League clubs with which they make these “handshake” deals—while their families take out loans based on future earnings, which may never appear.

Hope for long-term results

Economics and leadership are not the only factors in the decline of African Americans in professional baseball. The sport has declined as “America’s pastime” for decades, and for many is considered less “cool” than sports due to its slower pace—as well as kids’ alternative activities in the summer months—leading to a drop in viewership, especially among young viewers.

African Americans have also been historically discouraged from playing certain positions, particularly the on-field leadership positions of catcher and pitcher, the latter of which is the most visible position in the sport. This position “stacking” has historically impacted all sports, including basketball (point guard) and football (quarterback) due to discriminatory and false assumptions that African American players were not intelligent enough to play those positions. Basketball and football have seen dramatic shifts at these positions while baseball still sees limitations for African Americans at certain positions.

As with viewership, some of the issues pushing African Americans from baseball are emblematic of the decline in baseball’s overall popularity. However, there are some glimmers of hope for the future of African Americans in the sport. The House v. NCAA settlement will allow schools to increase the number of student athlete scholarships up to the roster limit, which is 34 in Division I—nearly triple the current limit.

Frank Robinson had a distinguished career as a player before becoming a manager. (Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images)

The opportunity to earn compensation directly from schools may also support continued involvement in the sport. Much like name, image and likeness opportunities, however, revenue sharing will disproportionately go to the top-earning sports: reports from school point to about 75% of revenue sharing going to football and 15% going to basketball with other sports sharing the rest.

Outside of the college ranks, MLB has been actively involved in a number of initiatives to try to increase participation among young players, including Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) that was started in 1989 and is now sponsored by Nike. Players like Jimmy Rollins and recent Hall of Fame inductee C.C. Sabathia are both alumni of the program, but results have been less impactful in recent years with fewer alumni from the United States advancing to professional baseball. MLB also runs the Dream Series in Arizona, a training academy focused on African American pitchers and catchers, in conjunction with USA Baseball during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The Andre Dawson Classic, named for the Hall of Fame player, is a round-robin tournament for HB�鶹��Ѱ��baseball programs that runs every year at the Jackie Robinson Training Complex in Florida.

There is hope these efforts will yield long-term results and reverse the decline of African American players in baseball. The sport still needs to address its diminishing cachet among young sports fans in the United States and the lack of African American mentors and leaders in the sport, but some of the structures are there to encourage a renaissance of great Black baseball figures 50 years after Frank Robinson broke the managerial glass ceiling.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about critical sports studies? Show your support.

Fifty years after Frank Robinson became the first Black manager in Major League Baseball, the league is struggling with a significant decline in Black players and leaders.

Traditional

White

Frank Robinson at Nationals Park. (Photo: Nick Wass/Associated Press)

Division of Social Sciences

In the archaeological record, size does matter

Related Articles

Initiative gives students a voice with hip-hop

Related Articles

Embracing all the joy in Mudville

Off

Picturing climate change in the West

Related Articles

How March went mad … for basketball

Related Articles

Come for the cheese and pepperoni, stay for the lively political discussion

Related Articles

Counting hidden deaths at the U.S.’s most dangerous border crossing

Related Articles

Nationalism and diplomacy are inherent to international sporting events

Related Articles

Black History Month celebration emphasizes building the ‘beloved community’

Related Articles

Breaking the color barrier in baseball leadership

Inclusive Sports Summit

Related Articles