War Football
War Football

Author: Chris Serb

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-06-26

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1538124858

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During World War I, American army camps, navy stations and marine barracks formed football's first true all-star teams, competing against each other and top colleges while raising millions of dollars for the war effort. More than fifty college football hall-of-famers, dozens of future generals, and two Medal of Honor winners would play for, coach, or promote military teams during the war, including Dwight Eisenhower, Walter Camp, and George Halas. In War Football: World War I and the Birth of the NFL, Chris Serb recounts a fascinating chapter of military and sports history. He details three of the best but long-forgotten seasons of American football, when college amateurs mixed with blue-collar pros on the field of play. These games showed investors a lucrative market for teams of post-collegiate stars and made players realize that their football careers didn’t have to end after college. Soon the barriers to professionalism began to fall, and within two years of the Armistice the National Football League was born. War Football explores for the first time this lost chapter of sports history and makes a direct connection between World War I and the founding of the NFL. Seven future Hall-of-Famers led the charge of more than 200 military veterans who played in, coached for, and shaped the character of the young league. Football fans, sports historians, and military historians alike will find this book a fascinating read.

Duty, Honor, Victory
Duty, Honor, Victory

Author: Gary L. Bloomfield

Publisher: Lyons Press

Published: 2004-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592285488

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"It's hard to imagine Derek Jeter or Tiger Woods heading to Iraq to join the U.S. armed forces. But in World War II no American man between the ages of twenty and forty-five was too big to serve--except for the basketball players who exceeded the Army's 6'6" limits for recruits, a situation illustrated in this excellent book. Part log, part pictorial, and total history lesson, this book could be sent to school with your kids and used for social studies class. Riveting and moving." --Sports Illustrated "Bloomfield's extensively researched book . . . is a must-have for any sports-history fan. It's encyclopedic in scope and richly illustrated with fascinating photos." -- Army Times "This survey tells, with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, the tales of sportsmen who found themselves in a far deadlier kind of combat. Bloomfield not only shows us a little-known side of World War II but also surveys a fascinating moment in American sports history." --Booklist From the sandlots, asphalt, and cinder tracks of 1930s America, to its country battlefields and stadium gridirons, the spirit of America's youthful athletes was abruptly transformed from doing their best in sports to showing the mettle in life-and-death warfare. Painstakingly researched and profusely illustrated, Duty, Honor, Victory tells the stories of the well-known athletes whose on-field exploits brought another type of fame, but whose battlefield duty has been long overlooked. Here is football's Chuck Bednarik flying bombing missions over Germany; baseball's Bob Feller commanding an anti-aircraft gun crew aboard the USS Alabama; Warren Spahn wounded and nearly killed when the bridge at Remagen collapses; and Yogi Berra on a rocket boat in Normandy. Duty, Honor, Victory addresses all sports, from tennis and golf, to baseball, football, and basketball. Included here are stories of well-known professionals, lesser known college players, as well as black athletes who fought for our country during World War II. From the origins of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the 1930s through their defeats in 1945--extending into 1946 and the integration of major league baseball--this book shows every aspect of America's athletes in World War II.

The Great War in America
The Great War in America

Author: Garrett Peck

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1681779447

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The Great War’s bitter outcome left the experience largely overlooked and forgotten in American history. This timely book is a reexamination of America’s first global experience as we commemorate WWI's centennial. The U.S. steered clear of the Great War for more than two years, but President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly led the divided country into the conflict with the goal of making the world “safe for democracy.” The country assumed a global role for the first time and attempted to build the foundations for world peace, only to witness the experience go badly awry and it retreated into isolationism.The Great War was the first continent-wide conflagration in a century, and it drew much of the world into its fire. By the end, four empires and their royal houses had fallen, communism was unleashed, the map of the Middle East was redrawn, and the United States emerged as a global power—only to withdraw from the world’s stage.The United States was disillusioned with what it achieved in the earlier war and withdrew into itself. Americans have tried to forget about it ever since. The Great War in America presents an opportunity to reexamine the country’s role on the global stage and the tremendous political and social changes that overtook the nation because of the war.

American Sports and the Great War
American Sports and the Great War

Author: Peter C. Stewart

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-02-26

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1476681058

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Drawing on newspaper accounts, college yearbooks and the recollections of veterans, this book examines the impact of World War I on sports in the U.S. As young men entered the military in large numbers, many colleges initially considered suspending athletics but soon turned to the idea of using sports to build morale and physical readiness. Recruits, mostly in their twenties, ended up playing more baseball and football than they would have in peacetime. Though most college athletes volunteered for military duty, others replaced them so that the reduction of competition was not severe. Pugilism gained participants as several million men learned how to box.

Selling the Great War
Selling the Great War

Author: Alan Axelrod

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2009-03-03

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0230619592

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The riveting, untold story of George Creel and the Committee on Public Information -- the first and only propaganda initiative sanctioned by the U.S. government. When the people of the United States were reluctant to enter World War I, maverick journalist George Creel created a committee at President Woodrow Wilson's request to sway the tide of public opinion. The Committee on Public Information monopolized every medium and avenue of communication with the goal of creating a nation of enthusiastic warriors for democracy. Forging a path that would later be studied and retread by such characters as Adolf Hitler, the Committee revolutionized the techniques of governmental persuasion, changing the course of history. Selling the War is the story of George Creel and the epoch-making agency he built and led. It will tell how he came to build the and how he ran it, using the emerging industries of mass advertising and public relations to convince isolationist Americans to go to war. It was a force whose effects were felt throughout the twentieth century and continue to be felt, perhaps even more strongly, today. In this compelling and original account, Alan Axelrod offers a fascinating portrait of America on the cusp of becoming a world power and how its first and most extensive propaganda machine attained unprecedented results.

America and the Great War
America and the Great War

Author: Margaret E. Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-05-30

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1620409836

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Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year for 2017 "A uniquely colorful chronicle of this dramatic and convulsive chapter in American--and world--history. It's an epic tale, and here it is wondrously well told." --David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of FREEDOM FROM FEAR From August 1914 through March 1917, Americans were increasingly horrified at the unprecedented destruction of the First World War. While sending massive assistance to the conflict's victims, most Americans opposed direct involvement. Their country was immersed in its own internal struggles, including attempts to curb the power of business monopolies, reform labor practices, secure proper treatment for millions of recent immigrants, and expand American democracy. Yet from the first, the war deeply affected American emotions and the nation's commercial, financial, and political interests. The menace from German U-boats and failure of U.S. attempts at mediation finally led to a declaration of war, signed by President Wilson on April 6, 1917. America and the Great War commemorates the centennial of that turning point in American history. Chronicling the United States in neutrality and in conflict, it presents events and arguments, political and military battles, bitter tragedies and epic achievements that marked U.S. involvement in the first modern war. Drawing on the matchless resources of the Library of Congress, the book includes many eyewitness accounts and more than 250 color and black-and-white images, many never before published. With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David M. Kennedy, America and the Great War brings to life the tempestuous era from which the United States emerged as a major world power.

War Fever
War Fever

Author: Randy Roberts

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1541672674

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A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

American Sports, 1970
American Sports, 1970

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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A collection of black-and-white photographs showing fans taking in America's sporting events, and represents the social landscape at the height of the Vietnam War.

Sport, Militarism and the Great War
Sport, Militarism and the Great War

Author: Thierry Terret

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1135760888

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The Great War has been largely ignored by historians of sport. However sport was an integral part of cultural conditioning into both physiological and psychological military efficiency in the decades leading up to it. It is time to acknowledge that the Great War also had an influence on sport in post-war European culture. Both are neglected topics. Sport, Militarism and the Great War deals with four significant aspects of the relationship between sport and war before, during and immediately after the 1914-1918 conflict. First, it explores the creation and consolidation of the cult of martial heroism and chivalric self-sacrifice in the pre-war era. Second, it examines the consequences of the mingling of soldiers from various nations on later sport. Third, it considers the role of the Great War in the transformation of the leisure of the masses. Finally, it examines the links between war, sport and male socialisation. The Great War contributed to a redefinition of European masculinity in the post-war period. The part sport played in this redefinition receives attention. Sport, Militarism and the Great War is in two parts: the Continental (Part I) and the "Anglo-Saxon" (Part II). No study has adopted this bilateral approach to date. Thus, in conception and execution, it is original. With its originality of content and the approaching centenary of the advent of the Great War in 2014, it is anticipated that the book will capture a wide audience. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

American Sport in International History
American Sport in International History

Author: Daniel M. DuBois

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350134732

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This book explores how American sports, especially basketball, baseball and American football, have projected the US into the world, and brought the world into America. Taking a chronological approach it traces the development of American sports from the turn of the 20th century, highlighting how international forces such as immigration, geopolitics and war have influenced the trajectory of sport in the US, and thus the American experience. DuBois also considers the globalization of American sport and how this soft power shaped international relations throughout the American century. Addressing key questions about the role of sport in the rise of the United States, it frames themes that have come to define sports history; gender, race, economics and politics. It argues that while sport has not necessarily been a catalyst for change, it has often mirrored social issues, and sometimes served as an important tool of progress. Synthesizing major works alongside primary sources, the chapters study boxing, hockey, track and field and soccer alongside the 'big three' (basketball, baseball and American football) through a number of case studies to offer a novel interpretation of American sport history. Spanning early Native American sport, the export of baseball in the American empire, the role of basketball in the Cold War, the influence of immigrants and women in sports, and modern day sport culture, American Sport in International History asks what the role of sport has been and will be in a shifting international environment.