How were different forms of entertainment popularized (specifically looking for book/paper suggestions)?

by RealDaq

TL;DR Need book/paper suggestions for researching the topics listed below.

I'm writing a paper that compares the growth of various forms of entertainment. The ultimate goal is to provide a book-length analysis of the burgeoning professional videogame industry (esports) and where it stands in relation to more established entertainment forms. Specifically I'm looking for scholarly books/papers on the history of the following topics:

  • Soccer, American Football, Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Poker, film and television, video games, and tabletop games.

I am not opposed to popular histories. Just because it is popular history doesn't mean it can't also be scholarly (I would call Daniel Yergin's The Prize a scholarly popular history). What is important to me is that the books or papers point me in the direction of useful primary sources and additional secondary ones.

I'm also interested in supplementing my research on specific entertainment forms by utilizing lessons from seemingly unrelated industries into this paper's analysis. The following industries are ones I am looking at as possible sources for inspiration:

  • Energy, Marketing/Advertising, Automobiles, Hollywood (I guess this has already been mentioned in the previous list), and industries changed/made possible by the Internet.

Finally, I am also going to be looking at the ways that different industries and entertainment mediums have dealt with social issues such as the treatment of women and minorities, unionization, and changes in the industry (new competition, downsizing, market downturns changing profitability).

Thanks!

FYI: My degree is in American History and am doing this paper as a personal pet project of mine (in other words, it's not a term paper assignment). I have an economist friend of mine helping me for when I need to do side by side economic comparisons.

cyborges

Well, there are actually thousands of scholarly sources on the things you are asking for, so it's difficult to decide what is worth listing. I don't know much about sports history, but I can speak to the related secondary categories that you mentioned.

For instance, for Advertising, you might start with:

  • Richard Fox and Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption
  • Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising
  • Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream
  • William Leach, Land of Desire
  • Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress

For film you might look at:

  • Vanessa Schwartz, and Leo Charney, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
  • Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film
  • Donald Gomery, The Studio System
  • Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood

For technologies you might look at:

  • Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media
  • Andre Millard, America on Record
  • William Kenney, The Phonograph and Recorded Music in American Life
  • Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV
  • Susan Douglas, Listening In

and so on. If this a pet project (i.e., you don't intend to publish), you might just look to popular histories, since they will probably furnish more of broad-strokes analysis that you might find more interesting/useful. If not, I'd suggest narrowing how you are going to approach the project; for instance, one could easily write a monograph-length book on comparative technologies between "esports" and other consumption of "sports". Alternatively, I could imagine a narrative that is specifically about the role of "esports" in shaping or popularizing certain sports (and how playing them is shaped by the rules in the first place), which would be an analysis of the games themselves and their different "translations" over time.