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“Only with the London games of 1908 did the now familiar model of official gold, silver and bronze medals, awarded on the day they were won, emerge. Even then, the ceremony lacked drama. There was no podium, no flags, and no music, just the gruff words of IOC grandees and floral bouquets. Flags and music arrived in 1928, but there was still no podium.”
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
“To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’.38”
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
― The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“to one rare and prescient German observer, writing in 1913, it was obviously mere prelude. ‘The Olympic Games are a war, a real war. You can be sure that many participants are willing to offer – without hesitation – several years of their life for a victory of the fatherlands . . . The Olympic idea of the modern era has given us a symbol of world war which does not show its military character very openly, but – for those who can read sports statistics – it gives us enough insight into world ranking.”
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
“Notoriously, during the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe, Hitler equated ‘indigenous inhabitants’ with ‘Indians’ and declared “the Volga must be our Mississippi.”
― Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
― Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
“In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too. He certainly thought that the English model and its focus on team sports and ball games was preferable to the regimented gymnastics of the German Turnen tradition. Many in France had looked to Prussia, its traditions of nationalist gymnastics, drill and military success, and called for the transformation of French physical education and the armed forces on German lines. Coubertin, by contrast, argued, ‘It is citizens more than soldiers that France needs. It is not militarism that our education needs, but freedom.”
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
― The Games: A Global History of the Olympics
Siying’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Siying’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
15 books
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30 friends
235 books
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51 friends
41 books
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122 friends
212 books
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122 friends
211 books
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89 friends
51 books
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77 friends
89 books
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9 friends
2 books
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74 friends
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