Sports

Most of the sports in these pictures were still being invented while the photographers were taking them. The rules were loose, the equipment was homemade by modern standards, and nobody yet knew which games would last.

Football is the clearest case. The first intercollegiate game was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, and it looked more like soccer than anything played today. Over the next few decades the college game turned into a mass of bodies pushing forward, and it grew so violent that reformers threatened to ban it. The forward pass was legalized in 1906 partly to open the game up. The photographs show leather headgear or none at all, and crowds in overcoats and derby hats.

Lawn tennis came over from England in the 1870s and caught on quickly with people who had lawns. Early players wore what they would wear to a garden party. Women played in long skirts, corsets and hats, and the pictures make it plain how much skill that took.

Track and field got its big lift from the modern Olympic Games, first held in Athens in 1896. College and athletic-club meets were well covered by the news photo services of the early 1900s, and a sprinter in mid-stride was exactly the kind of picture the faster cameras of that time were made for. Water sports cover swimming, diving and rowing, along with the bathing suits that changed sharply over these years.

The bullfight pictures are a different world. They come from Spain and Mexico, where the bullfight was as much a public ceremony as a sport, with a full arena and a strict order of events. Notice the crowd in all of these photographs, not just the athletes. Who came to watch, and what they wore, says as much about the time as the game does.