All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters. Register now!

“The World Upside Down,” and Then Not: The Social History of Racetrack Space
Holly Kruse

            The situated practices of horse racing in public space have a deep history, and examining the development of horse racing’s physical and social structures in the Great Britain and the United States has much to tell us about contemporary racing spaces. Historically, racetrack architecture created, reinforced, and responded to received notions of gender, race, and class, and their appropriate locations in social space.

            At the beginning of Thoroughbred racing in the early nineteenth century in Great Britain, local racetracks were open areas, and thus places where people of different social stations and sexes could gather in shared activity and social play. During race meets, towns, including London’s suburbs, had carnival-like atmospheres. As the century progressed, however, more and more racecourses were enclosed, limiting excessive carnivalesque behavior and requiring paid admission. The physical structures of the enclosed racecourses significantly affected the forms of social behavior that took place within their confines, instituting more segregation among groups of attendees.

            A similar trend emerged at American Thoroughbred race meets in the nineteenth century and continued in the early-to-mid twentieth century as tracks like Saratoga and Hialeah marketed themselves as attractive entertainment destinations by adding physical features like elaborate landscaping and architecture. Recent attempts to make racetracks more inviting venues for the general public, like Churchill Downs’ renovation, have often resulted in increasingly divided and expensive spaces, reifying separations in social space in the physical spaces of the racetrack.

Read our Member Monday profile of Holly Kruse here.