JRN 362/SPS 362 - Lecture One

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football Rich Hanley, Associate Professor Lecture One

Transcript of JRN 362/SPS 362 - Lecture One

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture One

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Background to the Course• “We must have the game; we

need it.” – C.W. Whitney, Harper’s (1894)

• We must we have it and why must we need it, then and now?

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Big Questions• Whitney wrote that less than 20

years after the first game of modern football took place.

• Why did Americans permanently take to football so early in its development?

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Big Questions• How did it go from this …

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Big Questions• … to this in a period of less than

20 years?

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Big Questions• How did the game become,

even before the turn of the 20th century, the experience that would shape and define the lives of many who played the game …

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Big Questions

… And drive the greatest literary and artistic figures in U.S. history to draw deep psychological portraits from what they saw in the game’s impact on the lives of Americans.

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Big Questions• It is startling to learn that arguably the

greatest work in 20th century American drama – “Death of a Salesman” – has football as a core element.

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Big Questions• … as does arguably the greatest

novel of 20th century literature – The Great Gatsby.

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Big Questions

… And lead the great dancer Vaclav Nijinsky to say this in 1916 after his first view of the game: “I had expected to be shocked by its brutality, but I must confess that what I saw had a certain rugged beauty about it … “

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Big Questions• Where, how and why did this

obsession with football begin?

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Big Answer• It began with a simple impulse to

prove manliness when the opportunities to do so in a way honorably enough for college students were rapidly disappearing in the 19th century.

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• America had expanded to its geographic boundaries to the west and south, had fought a Civil War and survived, and had linked the nation by rail.

• The nation engaged in a violent eviction of aboriginal peoples in the aftermath of the Civil War.

• Young men had plenty of chances to engage in physical courage.

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• Work itself, though, was changing, particularly for college men, who would serve as lawyers, doctors, managers of factory.

• On the other hand, the working class maintained its culture of masculinity – at least for the moment.

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• Take this quote from the 21st century about men in the workforce toiling in mines or on the seas as fishermen.

• It accurately describes the way of manhood for the working class in the U.S.

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Big Answer• “Miners and fishermen, two groups of

skilled workers winning goods from nature, exploited and well paid at the same time, doing hard jobs that women didn’t’ do, for whom the danger was not a source of menace but also of pride, a way to test your manhood in front of other men.”

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• “Test your manhood in front of other men.”

• That became a problem on college campuses in the northeast.

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• Rowdy students would engage in brawls and challenge other classes to tests of strength with fists and snowballs packed around rocks.

• This method to unleash youthful energies caused many issues between towns and colleges.

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• Men who did not attend college, meanwhile, were clustered in regions at the frontier that were nominated numerically by males.

• The following map shows the male distribution in 1870.

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• The condition under which male Americans could prove their strength and bravery – manliness - had been called into question, threatened by what Emerson once called “parlor soldiers.”

• Google Ngrams show use of the words “manliness” and “manhood” in books increased in the late 19th century.

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• It is within this context – the search for manly stuff to do in a rapidly changing world – that football emerged to methodically dominate autumn in the United States.

• But there’s a bit more to this than it seems, and we will get to it at the top of lecture two.