The Olympic Movement
Sport, Global Politics and Identity
This multi-archive resource covers the development of the modern Olympic Games from 1896 to 1992, telling the story of the world’s biggest sporting event through primary sources while shining a light on key social and political phenomena throughout the twentieth century.
The material within the collection invites users to examine the original ideologies behind the Olympic Movement and chart the progressive transition to the event that we know today. The resource will also allow users to research key debates in sport, such as the emergence of professional athletes and commercial sponsorship.
This resource provides a comprehensive documentary record of the history of the Olympic Games as well as the growing prominence and influence sport had over multiple aspects of culture, society, and politics (and vice versa) around the world between the 1890s and the 1990s.
Highlights
- Correspondence relating to the campaign to re-instate medals awarded to the Indigenous American athlete, Jim Thorpe
- Documentation of unsuccessful bids – including both host city bids and attempts by practitioners of different sports such as chess, motorsport and bodybuilding to be added to the Olympic programme
- Documents relating to controversies and sporting boycotts, including the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, and the sporting boycotts of Apartheid-era South Africa and the 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics
- Minutes of meetings for the International Stoke Games Federation Council, documenting the early development of the Paralympic Movement
- Personal papers of US Olympians providing unique insights into experiences of athletes
Included in
Key data
Source archives
- British Film Institute
- Buckinghamshire Archives
- Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
- United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- The Cold War
- Disability History
- Gender History
- Global History
- History of Sport
- History of the Olympics
- International History
- Kinesiology
- Sports Management and Administration
- Bid books and host city applications
- Correspondence
- Diaries and scrapbooks
- Ephemera (pamphlets, leaflets and programmes)
- Films
- Government files
- Minutes and reports
- Newspaper and magazine clippings
- Objects
- Official records of the International Olympic Committee
- Photographs
- Matthew Philip Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Stanley Arnold, Northern Illinois University
- Ian Brittain, Coventry University
- Dikaia Chatziefstathiou, Canterbury Christ Church University
- Matthew Llewellyn, California State University, Fullerton
- Christine O’Bonsawin, University of Victoria, Canada
- Lindsay Parks Pieper, University of Lynchburg
- Martin Polley, De Montfort University
- Communities, Peoples and Nations
- Cultural Studies
- Gender
- International Relations
- Political History and Science
- War and Conflict
