Sports in Early America

North American sports developed from varied roots. Natives of North America and Mesoamerica pursued ball games that held religious and spiritual components. Europeans, in contrast, pursued more secular pastimes – horse racing and hunting were an integral part of upper-class society, while common people participated in a “festive culture” that included folk contests such as foot races and wrestling. The Africans and Europeans who came to the Americas sought to incorporate aspects of their traditional cultures into New World games, giving rise to events that included horse races, cockfighting, the rodeo-like charreria that developed in areas ruled by the Spanish, and the distinctive forms of martial arts practiced by free and enslaved Africans. But sports faced obstacles as well, including the restrictive concept of “lawful sport” that developed in Puritan-dominated New England and Quaker-influenced Pennsylvania, the religious zeal of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening, and the development of republican ideology in the early years of the American Republic.