Overview

Americans are obsessed with football, yet they know little about the man who shaped the game to make it uniquely technical, physical, and 'man-making' at once. Walter Camp, the ""Father of American Football,"" was the foremost authority on American athletics and arguably the greatest amateur American athlete of his time. In Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man, Julie Des Jardins chronicles the life of the clock company executive and self-made athlete who remade football and redefined the ideal man. As a student at Yale University, Camp was a varsity letterman who led the earliest efforts to codify the rules and organization of football-including the line of scrimmage and ""downs""-to make it distinct from English rugby. He also invented the All-America Football Team and wrote some of the first football fiction, guides, and sports page coverage, making him the foremost popularizer of the game. Within a decade American football was an obsession on college campuses of the Northeast. By the turn of the century, it was a bona fide national pastime.Since the Civil War, college men of good breeding had not a physical skirmish to harden them. They had grown soft, Americans feared, both in body and attitude. Camp saw football as the antidote to the degeneration of these young men. When massive numbers of college football players enlisted to fight in World War I, Camp held them up as proof that football turned men effective and courageous. His influence over the game, however, was not always viewed as beneficial. Under his watch, dozens of college and high school players were killed or maimed on the gridiron. President Theodore Roosevelt urged him to reform football to prevent administrators from banning it, but Camp was ambivalent about removing the very physicality that made the game man-making in his eyes. The criticism targeted at him over the aggressiveness of football still haunts the game today.In this fast-paced biography, Julie Des Jardins shows how the ""gentleman athlete"" was as much the arbiter of football as he was the arbiter of modern manhood. Though eventually football took on meanings that Camp never intended, his impact on the professional and college game is simply unsurpassed.

Full Product Details

Author:   Julie Des Jardins (Associate professor of history, Associate professor of history, Baruch College, City University of New York, Short Hills, NJ)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.10cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.748kg
ISBN:  

9780199925629

ISBN 10:   0199925623
Pages:   416
Publication Date:   29 October 2015
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Pregame Commentary Introduction: The Forgotten Father of Football First Quarter: Adolescence Chapter 1: Survival of the Fittest in New Haven, 1860s-1880 Chapter 2: The Disillusionment of Afterlife, 1883-1888 Second Quarter: Manhood Epitomized Chapter 3: Alice and All-American-ness, 1888-1891 Chapter 4: Manifest Destiny, 1892-1894 Chapter 5: Necessary Roughness? 1893-1894 Chapter 6: Martial, Marketable, and Masculine, 1895-1899 Halftime: The Yale Man at the Turn of the Century Third Quarter: Manhood Tested Chapter 7: Camp's Boyology: The Making of Eligible Men Chapter 8: Make Men, but Do Not Break Them, 1903-1906 Chapter 9: Rewriting the Gridiron Narrative, 1906-1912 Fourth Quarter: Manhood Reconsidered Chapter 10: Realizing Real All-Americans in the 1910s Chapter 11: Changing of the Guard, 1910-1916 Chapter 12: Preparing Men for Real Battle, 1917-1918 Chapter 13: Death and Democratization, 1919-1925 Postgame Analysis Notes Selected Bibliography

Reviews

As Julie Des Jardins demonstrates in her incisive and comprehensive new biography of Camp, the modern game still bears his imprint, both on and off the field. -New Yorker This thoroughly researched biography is a major work and essential for all collections. -Library Journal, Starred Review

""The author skillfully illustrates how the sport of football uniquely spoke to men about being manly and helped to introduce new notions of masculinity. Walter Camp, then, is both a fine sport history and a superb cultural analysis.""--R. W. Roberts, CHOICE ""[Des Jardins] capably steers her narrative through the opaque spaces of his life while touching on, without becoming mire in, his many sports ventures. The author expertly conveys the crucial phases of Camp's career...Camp's outsized role in creating arguably America's most popular sport and his influence on his era make it all the more essential to read this well-researched and carefully crafted book.""--Journal of Sport History ""As Julie Des Jardins demonstrates in her incisive and comprehensive new biography of Camp, the modern game still bears his imprint, both on and off the field.""--New Yorker ""This thoroughly researched biography is a major work and essential for all collections.""--Library Journal, Starred Review

Author Information

Julie Des Jardins is the author of The Madame Curie Complex, Lillian Gilbreth: Redefining Domesticity, and Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions