Download or read book Shake Down the Thunder written by Murray A. Sperber and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sperber. . .tackles the details, great and small, unearthing a treasure." —New York Times Book Review Shake Down the Thunder traces the history of the Notre Dame football program—which has acquired almost mythical proportions—from its humble origins in the 19th century to its status as the paragon of college sports. It presents the true story of the program's formative years, the reality behind the myths. Both social history and sports history, this book documents as never before the first half-century of Notre Dame football and relates it to the rise of big-time intercollegiate athletics, the college sports reform movement, and the corrupt sporting press of the period. Shake Down the Thunder is must reading for all Fighting Irish fans, their detractors, and any reader engaged by American cultural history.

Download or read book Shake Down the Thunder written by Murray A. Sperber and published by Henry Holt & Company. This book was released on 1993 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on archival materials, including Knute Rockne's private correspondence, to reveal the history of Notre Dame's football program and the individuals behind that program

Download or read book Shake Down the Thunder written by Murray Sperber and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The University of Notre Dame written by Thomas E. Blantz C.S.C. and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Blantz’s monumental The University of Notre Dame: A History tells the story of the renowned Catholic university’s growth and development from a primitive grade school and high school founded in 1842 by the Congregation of Holy Cross in the wilds of northern Indiana to the acclaimed undergraduate and research institution it became by the early twenty-first century. Its growth was not always smooth—slowed at times by wars, financial challenges, fires, and illnesses. It is the story both of a successful institution and of the men and women who made it so: Father Edward Sorin, the twenty-eight-year-old French priest and visionary founder; Father William Corby, later two-term Notre Dame president, who gave absolution to the soldiers of the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg; the hundreds of Holy Cross brothers, sisters, and priests whose faithful service in classrooms, student residence halls, and across campus kept the university progressing through difficult years; a dedicated lay faculty teaching too many classes for too few dollars to assure the university would survive; Knute Rockne, a successful chemistry teacher but an even more successful football coach, elevating Notre Dame to national athletic prominence; Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president for thirty-five years; the 325 undergraduate young women who were the first to enroll at Notre Dame in 1972; and thousands of others. Blantz captures the strong connections that exist between Notre Dame’s founding and early life and today’s university. Alumni, faculty, students, friends of the university, and fans of the Fighting Irish will want to own this indispensable, definitive history of one of America’s leading universities. Simultaneously detailed and documented yet lively and interesting, The University of Notre Dame: A History is the most complete and up-to-date history of the university available.

Download or read book Playing with God written by William J Baker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. This book traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.

Download or read book Natural Enemies written by John Kryk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called the "definitive history of the rivalry" by the Chicago Tribune, this updated history of the classic tilt is much more than just the recounting of old games. The fates of Michigan and Notre Dame have been intertwined since that cold November day in 1877 when the Wolverines literally taught the game of football to an eager group of Notre Dame students. Richly illustrated and now including games through the 2006 season, Natural Enemies weaves these two chronologies together to produce a college rivalry book like no other.

Download or read book Native Athletes in Sport and Society written by C. Richard King and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though many Americans might be aware of the Olympian and football Hall of Famer Jim Thorpe or of Navajo golfer Notah Begay, few know of the fundamental role that Native athletes have played in modern sports: introducing popular games and contests, excelling as players, and distinguishing themselves as coaches. The full breadth and richness of this tradition unfolds in Native Athletes in Sport and Society, which highlights the accomplishments of Indigenous athletes in the United States and Canada but also explores what these accomplishments have meant to Native American spectators and citizens alike. ø Here are Thorpe and Begay as well as the Winnebago baseball player George Johnson, the Snohomish Notre Dame center Thomas Yarr, the Penobscot baseball player Louis Francis Sockalexis, and the Lakota basketball player SuAnne Big Crow. Their stories are told alongside those of Native athletic teams such as the NFL?s Oorang Indians, the Shiprock Cardinals (a Navajo women?s basketball team), the women athletes of the Six Nations Reserve, and the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School?s girls? basketball team, who competed in the 1904 World?s Fair. Superstars and fallen stars, journeymen and amateurs, coaches and gatekeepers, activists and tricksters appear side by side in this collection, their stories articulating the issues of power and possibility, difference and identity, representation and remembrance that have shaped the means and meaning of American Indians playing sport in North America.

Download or read book Sports in American Life written by Richard O. Davies and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of author Richard O. Davies highly praised narrative of American sports, Sports in American Life: A History, features extensive revisions and updates to its presentation of an interpretative history of the relationship of sports to the larger themes of U.S. history. Updated include a new section on concussions caused by contact sports and new biographies of John Wooden and Joe Paterno. Features extensive revisions and updates, along with a leaner, faster-paced narrative than previous editions Addresses the social, economic, and cultural interaction between sports and gender, race, class, and other larger issues Provides expanded coverage of college sports, women in sports, race and racism in organized sports, and soccers sharp rise in popularity Features an all-new section that tackles the growing controversy of head injuries and concussions caused by contact sports

Download or read book American Sports written by Pamela Grundy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Sports is a comprehensive, analytical introduction to the history of American sports from the colonial era to the present. Pamela Grundy and Benjamin Rader outline the complex relationships between sports and class, gender, race, religion, and region in the United States. Building on changes in the previous edition, which expanded the attention paid to women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos, this edition adds numerous sidebars that examine subjects such as the Black Sox scandal, the worldwide influence of Jack Johnson, the significance of softball for lesbian athletes, and the influence of the point spread on sports gambling. Insightful, thorough, and highly readable, the new edition of American Sports remains the finest available introduction to the myriad ways in which sports have reinforced or challenged the values and behaviors of Americans, as well as the structure of American society.

Download or read book Creating the Big Ten written by Winton U Solberg and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big Ten football fans pack gridiron cathedrals that hold up to 100,000 spectators. The conference's fourteen member schools share a broadcast network and a 2016 media deal worth $2.64 billion. This cultural and financial colossus grew out of a modest 1895 meeting that focused on football's brutality and encroaching professionalism in the game. Winton U. Solberg explores the relationship between higher education and collegiate football in the Big Ten's first fifty years. This formative era saw debates over eligibility and amateurism roil the sport. In particular, faculty concerned with academics clashed with coaches, university presidents, and others who played to win. Solberg follows the conference's successful early efforts to put the best interests of institutions and athletes first. Yet, as he shows, commercial concerns undid such work after World War I as sports increasingly eclipsed academics. By the 1940s, the Big Ten's impact on American sports was undeniable. It had shaped the development of intercollegiate athletics and college football nationwide while serving as a model for other athletic conferences.

Download or read book Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon written by Eric Bain-Selbo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers are introduced to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches used to understand religion – including sociology, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology – and how they can be used to understand sport as a religious phenomenon. Topics include the formation of powerful communities among fans and the religious experience of the fan, myth, symbols and rituals and the sacrality of sport, and sport and secularization. Case studies are taken from around the world and include the Olympics (ancient and modern), football in the UK, the All Blacks and New Zealand national identity, college football in the American South, and gymnastics. Ideal for classroom use, Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon illuminates the nature of religion through sports phenomena and is a much-needed contribution to the field of religion and popular culture.

Download or read book King Football written by Michael Oriard and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark work explores the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in which the game became deeply embedded in American life. Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post, on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society. Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.

Download or read book College Football written by John Sayle Watterson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not. "In March [1892] Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco . . . The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and silver coins. When they finally totaled up the proceeds, they found that the revenues amounted to $30,000—a fair haul for a game that had to be temporarily postponed because no one had thought to bring a ball!"—from College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, Chapter Three In this comprehensive history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football in more than one hundred years has evolved from a simple game played by college students into a lucrative, semiprofessional enterprise. With a historian's grasp of the context and a novelist's eye for the telling detail, Watterson presents a compelling portrait rich in anecdotes, colorful personalities, and troubling patterns. He tells how the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, in which Yale forced a 0-0 tie in a championship game by retaining possession of the ball for the entire game, eventually led to the first-down rule that would begin to transform Americanized rugby into American football. He describes the kicks and punches, gouged eyes, broken collarbones, and flagrant rule violations that nearly led to the sport's demise (including such excesses as a Yale player who wore a uniform soaked in blood from a slaughterhouse). And he explains the reforms of 1910, which gave official approval to a radical new tactic traditionalists were sure would doom the game as they knew it—the forward pass. As college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, Watterson explains, the flow of cash added fuel to an already explosive mix. Coaches like Knute Rockne became celebrities in their own right, with highly paid speaking engagements and product endorsements. At the same time, the emergence of the first professional teams led to inevitable scandals involving recruitment and subsidies for student-athletes. Revelations of illicit aid to athletes in the 1930s led to failed attempts at reform by the fledgling NCAA in the postwar "Sanity Code," intended to control abuses by permitting limited subsidies to college players but which actually paved the way for the "free ride" many players receive today. Watterson also explains how the growth of TV revenue led to college football programs' unprecedented prosperity, just as the rise of professional football seemed to relegate college teams to "minor league" status. He explores issues of gender and race, from the shocked reactions of spectators to the first female cheerleaders in the 1930s to their successful exploitation by Roone Arledge three decades later. He describes the role of African-American players, from the days when Southern schools demanded all-white teams (and Northern schools meekly complied); through the black armbands and protests of the 60s; to one of the game's few successful, if limited, reforms, as black athletes dominate the playing field while often being shortchanged in the classroom. Today, Watterson observes, colleges' insatiable hunger for revenues has led to an abuse-filled game nearly indistinguishable from the professional model of the NFL. After examining the standard solutions for reform, he offers proposals of his own, including greater involvement by faculty, trustees, and college presidents. Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.

Download or read book Hesburgh of Notre Dame written by Todd C. Ream and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first comprehensive assessment of the life and legacy of Father Theodore Hesburgh (1917–2015), an educator, priest, public servant, and long-serving President of the University of Notre Dame. Despite being a transformative figure in Catholic higher education who led the University of Notre Dame for 35 years and wielded influence with US presidents on civil rights and other charged issues of his era, secular accounts of history often neglect to assess the efforts of religious figures such as Hesburgh. In this volume, the editors and their authors turn a fair-minded but critical eye to the priest's record to evaluate where he fits into the long development of Catholic higher education and Catholics' role in American public life.

Download or read book Democratic Sports written by Brad Austin and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American public universities suffered tremendous funding cuts during the 1930s, yet they were also responsible for educating increasing numbers of students. The mounting financial troubles, coupled with a perceived increase in the number of “radical” student activists, contributed to a general sense of crisis on American college campuses. University leaders used their athletic programs to combat this crisis and to preserve “traditional” American values and institutions, prescribing different models for men and women. Educators emphasized the competitive nature of men’s athletics, seeking to inculcate male college athletes (and their audiences) with individualistic, masculine values in order to reinforce the existing American political and economic systems. In stark contrast, the prevailing model of women’s college athletics taught a communal form of democracy. Strongly supported by almost all female athletic leaders, this “a girl for every game, and a game for every girl” model had replaced the more competitive model that had been popular until the 1920s. The new programs denied women individual attention and high-level competition, and they promoted the development of what was considered proper femininity. Whatever larger purposes these programs were intended to serve, they could not have survived without vocal supporters. Democratic Sports tells the important story of how men’s and women’s college athletic programs survived, and even thrived, during the most challenging decade of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Onward to Victory written by Murray Sperber and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Shake Down the Thunder, Murray Sperber's Onward to Victory is a brilliant, detailed, and engrossing work of social history for not only sports fans, but anyone interested in the development of modern American culture. With the 1940 release of the classic film Knute Rockne, All American, the myth of the hero scholar-athlete was born, and with it came the age of big-time college sports in America. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including press accounts, letters and diaries, historical papers, and interviews with many who were there, Murray Sperber recounts how the myths created by Hollywood studios were embellished and codified by a hungry press, infiltrating the collective unconscious with epic stories of players, coaches, and teams. As college sports became a mainstay of popular entertainment, they also were fertile ground for near-fatal scandal, ultimately giving rise to the modern NCAA. Sperber vividly re-creates the world of postwar America, with its all-powerful radiomen, its lurid press, its growing prosperity, and, of course, the infancy of television

Download or read book Beer and Circus written by Murray Sperber and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.