Jackie Robinson Breaking the Color Barrier in Baseball

Research Paper

Subject: Sport History

NOT HISTORY ABOUT SPORT

Order Topic: Jackie Robinson Instruction:

see the attach file

For this major assessment task, you have been set the challenge of producing an
research essay based on a topic of your choosing. In other words,
there is no list of set questions from which you select a topic. Instead, to
accommodate for everyone’s personal interests you are being given considerable
scope for developing your own tailored research question.
But, of course, some parameters have been set to ensure that you develop an
appropriate essay topic that is aligned to the unit and our intended learning
outcomes. The most crucial point is that your essay MUST tackle a question based
on the role/impact of sport in history. This means that you can focus on the political,
economic, social, and/or cultural significance of sport in any historical setting. There
are various approaches you can adopt. To cite a few options as examples:
• you may choose to focus on a single sport in order to examine a certain
issue (e.g. how jousting reinforced class hierarchy in medieval Britain, or
surfing’s shift from being a sub-culture to becoming a mega-industry, or
cycling and drugs etc.)
• you may select an individual case study to investigate a particular issue
(Jackie Robinson breaking the colour barrier in baseball, or Hitler and the
Berlin Olympics, or Phar Lap giving the working classes hope during the
Great Depression, or the “Miracle on Ice” hockey match at Lake Placid and
its significance in Cold War antagonisms between the Soviet Union and the
United States etc.)
• you may decide to address several sports as a way of exploring a particular
theme (such as gender, or race, or debates over amateurism versus
professionalism, or the relationship between sport and mass media etc.)

Answer preview:

Word: 1,800