In 2008, Joe and Betty Weider donated a second million dollars to the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas, and as a way to thank the Weiders for their many contributions to the fields of exercise and health as well as for their financial support to the university, The Joe and Betty Weider Museum of Physical Culture was established within the Stark Center. In addition to the million dollars, the Weiders also gave almost all of their personal art collection relating to the field of physical culture. A small part of that...

The reception to celebrate the official opening of the Joe and Betty Weider Museum of Physical Culture was private, and only invited guests were allowed to take photographs or to videotape the occasion. Almost 200 professional photographs—taken by several leading photographers including John Balik, the publisher and editor of Iron Man magazine and Robert Gardner, a longtime fashion and sport photographer who also worked for the Weider magazines for decades, are already up on our website [editor’s note: we are working to re-create this page]. As for moving images, the main video team was from MUSL, a group intent on...

The main point of today’s post is to announce that we have just placed on our Stark Center Research Page a digitized, searchable version of one of our most important documents—the almost 600-page scrapbook owned for decades by George Hackenschmidt, the World Wrestling Champion during the early part of the 20th century. The entire scrapbook is included on our site, and it is very gratifying to the Stark Center team to be able to make this unique artifact available.

The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is pleased and even a bit proud to have played a role in attracting the annual conference of the North American Society for Sport History to the University of Texas at Austin. Based on the latest projections, approximately 210 sport and physical culture historians will spend three full days in Austin giving papers, hearing papers, attending meetings, and enjoying the fellowship of like-minded folk from North America as well as the wider world beyond. What’s more, quite a few of the people coming to the conference are either coming early...

Those who know a bit—or a lot—about the collecting my wife Jan and I have done over the past decades realize that our focus has been on Physical Culture, broadly defined. (Those who remain unclear about what the term “Physical Culture” means might want to take a look at one of the earlier posts in this blog—“Physical Culture,” which appeared on September 23, 2009.) This “field” was the focus of our collecting because of our personal backgrounds as well as our understanding, as historians, that although there were many excellent libraries inside and outside the United States which dealt with...