Boxing in America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course, we will study the history of boxing in the United States and learn a great deal about the craft of boxing, what commentators have called "the sweet science." The class will do so in conventional and innovative ways. The course will explore the story of boxing in America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It will start in England and colonial America, move to places like nineteenth-century New York, New Orleans, and the California mining camps where boxing was transformed from a gambling pursuit among the working class into a mass spectator sport, examine the time when boxing became ascendant in America, and end in the late twentieth century when boxing was entangled with urban decay and changing race politics. The story of boxing is the story of America. The class will look at the rise of cities, mass migration, changing understandings of gender, race, and class, urban history, and the fortunes and misfortunes of postwar American culture.