Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

1803 The word amateur enters the English language. Originally it referred
solely to literary dilettantes, but during the 1860s people
changed the meaning of the word to refer to athletes who followed
the rules designed to keep working-class athletes from
competing with middle-class athletes.
About 1809 Incursions by British and Russian naval forces into Japanese
waters cause the Japanese government to regain an interest in
manufacturing cannons and other militarily useful weapons.
This said, it was the entirely unrelated threat of gang warfare
along the Tokaido Highway between Edo and Yokohama that
lay behind the era’s revived interest in sword fighting,
wrestling, and other traditional martial arts.
1811 A Prussian schoolmaster named Friedrich Ludwig Jahn establishes
a Turnverein (gymnastics club) at Hasenheide, a park just
outside Berlin. A strict moralist, Jahn saw Turnen (the term
means more than just gymnastics, as it originally included
weight lifting and wrestling, too) as a means of building character
in boys. He was an ardent patriot, and his club soon became
a hotbed of muscular pan-Germanism. As this pan-Germanism
frightened the conservative Prussian government, it
persecuted both Turners and Jahn from 1819 until 1842.
About 1815 Hung gar (Red Boxing) wushu appears in Fujian province. The
nineteenth-century Chinese used such arts to improve fitness or
health, make money for gamblers or reputation for prizefighters,
and attract new members to esoteric religious cults.
1819 The publication of Ivanhoe by the Scottish novelist Sir Walter
Scott helps create the Romantic perception of gallant knights in
shining armor; Scott’s chivalric ideal proves especially popular
in the American South. As a result, equestrian tournaments
were held in Charlottesville, Virginia, as late as 1863. (The latter
was a Confederate hospital town, and that particular tournament
featured one-armed knights who held the reins in their
teeth.)
1825 Jem Ward of London becomes the first British prizefighter to
receive a championship belt. (Although English wrestlers had
received championship belts for years, boxers usually preferred
cash prizes.) Similar belts were introduced into the United
States around 1885, mostly as a way of generating interest in
prizefights.
1827 On a sandbar outside Vidalia, Mississippi, a Louisiana slavesmuggler
and sugar merchant named James Bowie uses a large
knife to kill a local banker named Norris Wright; colorful
newspaper accounts of their fight start a journalistic tradition
in which all large single-edged knives are called Bowie knives.
Newspaper accounts aside, the big knives’ more usual uses included
shaving kindling, butchering game, and holding the
meat over the fire.
About 1830 An Italian woman named Rosa Baglioni is described as perhaps
the finest stage fencer in Weimar, Germany. German students
start fighting with the blunt-tipped swords known as Schläger
(blow) around the same time, perhaps because they are heavy
weapons less likely to be carried by women.
Chronological History of the Martial Arts 817