Continuing my dive into the backcatalogue of Health and Strength magazine is today’s discussion of an important, at least in my eyes, cover from the early 1920s. The cover features T.W. Standwell from, Dublin, Ireland. Standwell was one of the first Irishmen to appear on the cover of Health and Strength despite the fact that...
Health and Strength magazine began publishing in the late nineteenth century and, up until very recently, was still in circulation. Designed for a British audience, the magazine quickly became one of the most well read and well esteemed pieces of its time. In an age when information on weightlifting was hard to come by, Health...
In any normal year, one of sports’ greatest spectacles, the Tour de France, would have concluded about a month ago. This year’s tour has unsurprisingly been rescheduled to begin August 29, but the event pictured in this photograph permanently ended its 85-year run in 2016. The Critérium National de la Route was for many years...
Old physical culture dumbbells really are a strange phenomenon. From squeeze grip dumb-bells to old wooden objects, the devices people used to build their bodies in the early twentieth century sometimes defy belief. One of my favorite examples of this is undoubtedly the Sandow ‘ringing’ dumbbell. Eugen Sandow, who was recently covered in a Rogue...
In December of 1973, I took a workout at the Texas Athletic Club in Austin, Texas, and tested myself for the first time in the deadlift. I was inspired to see what I could lift that day by watching a young woman deadlifting at the gym who had entered a local powerlifting meet as a...
In 2019, I had the opportunity to spend a month traversing through the Stark Center’s numerous collections. Then in the final stages of completing my Ph.D. research, I left Austin after three weeks of frantic typing and photocopying with the unhappy realization that I had a lot more work to do than I realised. This,...
Here at the Stark Center, we are fortunate to have the Jody Conradt Papers, 1958-2017. Several years ago, Jody Conradt, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) Women’s Basketball Coach (1976-2007) and Women’s Athletic Director (1992-2001) and the first female collegiate coach to win 700 games, generously gifted to the Stark Center documents, memorabilia, and...
William B. Ward Collection, Box 220, Shelf 15-1 As the June days stack up and other sports leagues resume play, there still seems to be no prospect for the game that is most associated with the lazy days of American summers: baseball. This New York Yankees road jersey is made of grey flannel with navy...
Few scholars of physical culture and bodybuilding more generally will be unfamiliar with the name Eugen Sandow. Known by many as the father of modern bodybuilding, Sandow helped to popularize health, exercise and weight training to large swathes of individuals in Great Britain, the United States and further afield. He counted Kings and Queens as...
