It’s not just about cheering anymore. Since the early 1900s, cheerleaders have revved up crowds at pep rallies and sporting events. Today, cheerleaders also do something else – they cheer for trophies! With a mix of gymnastics, stunts, and spirit, competitive cheerleading is one of the fastest growing and most exciting sports out there. Whether it’s cheering for the home team or for the national title, cheerleaders are leading the way! Girls Play to Win highlights the trials and triumphs of women in sports. Topics include the sports history, rules, equipment, and key training skills. Enthusiasts will also learn more about the personalities and game-changers that contributed to their sport's development. Filled with fantastic action photos, this series gives young women the information they need to take their game to the next level. Library Media Connection's Editor's Choice

Information online is not stored or organized in any logical fashion, but this reference attempts to organize and catalog a small portion of the Web in a single resource of the best sites in each category.

Hanson (American studies, U. of New Mexico) offers an broad overview of cheerleading and its place in American culture, looking at the cheerleader as a symbol invested with both negative and positive values. She touches on issues such as the social context of the institutionalization and adult control of cheerleading; the changing patterns of age, class, and gender of participants; and the development of cheerleading in professional sports in the 1960s. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A thought-provoking journey into the complicated history of gender, sexuality, race, and social justice through the world of sports. Have you ever wondered why most cheerleaders are girls? Or why some athletes, like Caster Semenya, have to prove they’re women while there’s no testing for men? And why do athletes like Megan Rapinoe and Colin Kaepernick use sports as a platform for social justice, and should they? These questions and more are examined in Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy: The Evolution of Gender, Identity, and Race in Sports. Robyn Ryle uses the world of sports to examine the history, controversy, and current conversations around sexuality, race, and social justice, bringing in the stories of today’s athletes to highlight the issues. Topics covered include gender segregation, gender testing, transgender athletes, sexuality, homophobia, globalization, race, and activism. Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy shows the great strides that have been made in the sports world, but there are still questions that remain and work that needs to be done. This book brings to attention the ways in which sports can contribute to inequalities while also demonstrating how sports can help create a more just world for everyone.

Explore sociology′s key concepts, theories, methods, and original voices--all in one innovative text. Imagining Society: An Introduction to Sociology is an versatile and economical resource for your introductory course. With this single text, you can: Teach the discipline’s history, key concepts, subfields, and contributions to social science. Expose students to the central building blocks of sociology—short excerpts from the original works of classical and contemporary sociologists. Explain sociology’s key theoretical insights by connecting them to specific issues. Describe and illustrate the methods used by sociologists—not just in the opening chapter, but throughout the entire text. Engage students in thoughtful, self-directed projects and activities. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package.

Covering everything from sports to art, religion, music, and entrepreneurship, this book documents the vast array of African American cultural expressions and discusses their impact on the culture of the United States. According to the latest census data, less than 13 percent of the U.S. population identifies as African American; African Americans are still very much a minority group. Yet African American cultural expression and strong influences from African American culture are common across mainstream American culture—in music, the arts, and entertainment; in education and religion; in sports; and in politics and business. African American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs covers virtually every aspect of African American cultural expression, addressing subject matter that ranges from how African culture was preserved during slavery hundreds of years ago to the richness and complexity of African American culture in the post-Obama era. The most comprehensive reference work on African American culture to date, the multivolume set covers such topics as black contributions to literature and the arts, music and entertainment, religion, and professional sports. It also provides coverage of less-commonly addressed subjects, such as African American fashion practices and beauty culture, the development of jazz music across different eras, and African American business.

A book for athletes, parents and coaches that explores controversial and important issues about girls' athletics in today's culture.

The stereotype-laden message, delivered through clothes, music, books, and TV, is essentially a continuous plea for girls to put their energies into beauty products, shopping, fashion, and boys. This constant marketing, cheapening of relationships, absence of good women role models, and stereotyping and sexualization of girls is something that parents need to first understand before they can take action. Lamb and Brown teach parents how to understand these influences, give them guidance on how to talk to their daughters about these negative images, and provide the tools to help girls make positive choices about the way they are in the world. In the tradition of books like Reviving Ophelia, Odd Girl Out, Queen Bees and Wannabees that examine the world of girls, this book promises to not only spark debate but help parents to help their daughters.

In this two volume set, educators explore the intersection of gender and education. Their entries deal with educational theories, research, curricula, practices, personnel, and policies, but also with variations in the gendering of education across historical and cultural contexts. The various contributors discuss gender as a social construction. The latest research on boys and masculinities, as well as girls and feminism, is included. The entries in this work cover the breadth of topics related to gender and education. They provide reference information on the history and condition of gender and education from elementary to high school. Entries cover such topics as: alternative schools, historically black colleges and universities in the United States, military colleges and academies, private and public single-sex and co-educational schools, literacy, mathematics achievement, women's centers, teacher interactions with girls and boys, affirmative action in U.S. higher education, sororities and fraternities, educator sexual misconduct, expectations of teachers for boys and girls, heterosexism and homophobia, bullying, harassment, and violence among students, salaries of male and female educators, school choice and gender equity, disabled students and gender equity, Title IX and school sports, black feminism, womanism, and queer theory.

The one-hit wonder has a long and storied history in popular music, exhorting listeners to dance, to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, to ponder mortality, to get a job, to bask in the sunshine, or just to get up and dance again. Catchy, memorable, irritating, or simply ubiquitous, one-hit wonders capture something of the mood of a time. This collection provides a series of short, sharp chapters focusing on one-hit wonders from the 1950s to the present day, with a view toward understanding both the mechanics of success and the socio-musical contexts within which such songs became hits. Some artists included here might have aspired to success but only managed one hit, while others enjoyed lengthy, if unremarkable, careers after their initial chart success. Put together, these chapters provide not only a capsule history of popular music tastes, but also ruminations on the changing nature of the music industry and the mechanics of fame.