Abstract
In this chapter, the author examines the ways historians construct knowledge about modern sport and its form, development, and meanings. The chapter begins with a set of basic questions about the emergence of modern sport, its causes, its motors of diffusion, and its cultural reception. The debates and disagreements ignited by the answers to these questions are summarized under three headings, origins and causes, diffusion, and reception, highlighting the shifting, and unstable, meanings they impose on modern sport. These questions have not only failed to produce a consensus among historians, they have also fueled debates and controversies that raise fundamental questions about the “coherence” of history as a discipline. The author critically examines the primary epistemologies which have framed, and continue to frame, historical enquiries into modern sport. The philosopher of history Alun Munslow labels these epistemologies reconstructionism and constructionism.