Play, Protest, and Politics in American Stadiums

Columbia Professor Frank Guridy presents his new book The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protests, and Play. Guridy tells the story of the American stadium, from the first wooden ballparks to today’s glass and steel mega arenas, and reveals how these venues have made and reshaped American life, from sports to politics.

Guridy will be in conversation with Simon Kuper, Financial Times columnist, sports journalist, and author.

From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure. Moving between the field, the press box, and the locker room, Guridy’s latest book recovers the hidden history of the stadium and its important role in the struggle for justice in America.

1964-2024: Celebrating 60 Years of Columbia at Reid Hall

2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Helen Rogers Reid’s gift of Reid Hall to Columbia University, which today houses the Columbia Global Paris Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the longstanding undergraduate programs, and Columbia’s M.A. in History and Literature program. Please join us as we celebrate this milestone. View the full anniversary program on our website.

Speakers

Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His previous book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean.

His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His scholarly articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies.

Simon Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He wrote the daily currencies column, before leaving the FT in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has been there ever since. Nowadays he writes a general column for the Weekend FT on all manner of topics from politics to books, and on cities including London, Paris, Johannesburg and Miami.

Organizers

The Columbia Global Paris Center addresses pressing global issues that are at the forefront of international education and research: agency and gender; climate and the environment; critical dialogues for just societies; encounters in the arts; and health and medical science. The Paris Global Center is part of Columbia Global, which brings together major global initiatives from across the university including the Columbia Global Centers, Columbia World Projects, the Committee on Global Thought, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and Undergraduate Global Engagement.

Each year the Institute for Ideas and Imagination brings together a cohort of 14-15 Fellows, half of them Columbia faculty and post-docs, the other half artists and writers from around the world, to spend a year together in work and conversation. The Institute fosters intellectual and creative diversity unconstrained by medium and discipline through the interaction of the arts and academia.