Play, Protest, and Politics in American Stadiums

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The sweeping story of the American stadium-from the first wooden ballparks to today's glass and steel mega-arenas-revealing how it has made, and remade, American life. Columbia Professor Frank Guridy presents his new book The Stadium, in conversation with Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.

In The Stadium, Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. 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, this 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 the gift of Reid Hall to Columbia University by Helen Rogers Reid. Today, the space houses the Columbia Global Paris Center, the 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 most recent book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice from the 19th century until the present. The book has been reviewed in the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and featured on NPR on . 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.

Organizer

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.

Venue

Nestled in the Montparnasse district, Reid Hall hosts several Columbia University initiatives: the Columbia Global Paris Center, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Columbia Undergraduate Programs, the M.A. in History and Literature, and the GSAPP Shape of Two Cities Program. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement with the world through educational programs, research initiatives, regional partnerships, and public events.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the Columbia Global Paris Center or its affiliates.

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