Princeton and Rutgers played the first game, in 1869. But it was at Yale where football evolved and no institution has a more meaty history of the sport. Yale was the first college to record 800 victories, that milestone reached in the year 2000. Sixty-six years before, a more significant triumph came unexpectedly to the Bulldogs on Princeton's field and from that contest emerged Yale's Ironmen. They were supposed to lose by at least three touchdowns to an undefeated opponent being touted as a Rose Bowl candidate. The eleven Yale starters played all 60 minutes, an uncommon feat never duplicated thereafter in major college football. The game was played against the background of the Depression. Yet Princeton's Palmer Stadium was full that warm November afternoon for the first time in six years. 'I guess people wanted to get their minds off their troubles," said the Yale quarterback, Jerry Roscoe, who threw the winning touchdown pass to Larry Kelley, the latter the first winner of the Heisman Trophy. How did this game, this success, affect the lives of those eleven men of iron? Who were they? What happened, as World War II descended and snared them?
Bowl Full of Memories: 100 Years of Football at the Yale Bowl covers the Yale football from its inception in 1872 and pays tribute to the historic Yale Bowl, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2014. Based on more than 150 interviews—more than 100 of which were conducted with former players—the book serves as a time-capsule of Yale football by those who took part in this most storied college football program. Players, coaches, writers, broadcasters and fans give their view of the spectacle, people, places, and contests that make Yale football history come to life. Marazzi, who has seen almost every game in the Yale Bowl in the last 50 years, gives due attention to the career of towering figures like legendary Yale football coach Walter Camp, whose story is important to understanding Yale football and the evolution of the game as we know it. And of course he covers the one of the oldest rivalries in college sports, between Yale and Harvard. The book takes readers into the huddle, the locker room, the practice field, the campus, and the hearts and minds of Yalies over the past century. Bowl Full of Memories: 100 Years of Football at the Yale Bowl is a book that every Yale alum, Ivy League and college football fan will want to own and refer to often. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
In November 1934, the Princeton football team-unbeaten in its last fifteen games-faced the 33 Yale Bulldogs, who gave new meaning to the term "underdogs." As much a thrilling play-by-play account of college football at its finest as it is a fascinating work of sports history, this book chronicles the season that brought Princeton and Yale together in a game like no other since.
In the 150 years of college football history, the national championship has been decided by unanimous vote only 33 times. This book analyzes the various methods of selecting these champions and what made the teams special. Drawing on archives and early published works, a firsthand description of the 1869 inaugural game between Princeton and Rutgers is provided, along with details of how these earliest teams were managed. The contributions and innovations of Walter Camp, the "Father of Football," are explored, as is the evolution of the game itself. Each unanimous season since the turn of the 20th century--from Yale in 1900 to LSU in 2019--is covered in detail, with a brief history of each school's football program. The question "is there a best ever team" is explored.
The mysterious, highly influential hidden world of Yale’s secret societies is revealed in a definitive and scholarly history. Secret societies have fundamentally shaped America’s cultural and political landscapes. In ways that are expected but never explicit, the bonds made through the most elite of secret societies have won members Pulitzer Prizes, governorships, and even presidencies. At the apex of these institutions stands Yale University and its rumored twenty-six secret societies. Tracing a history that has intrigued and enthralled for centuries, alluring the attention of such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Skulls and Keys traces the history of Yale’s societies as they set the foundation for America’s future secret clubs and helped define the modern age of politics. But there is a progressive side to Yale’s secret societies that we rarely hear about, one that, in the cultural tumult of the nineteen-sixties, resulted in the election of people of color, women, and gay men, even in proportions beyond their percentages in the class. It’s a side that is often overlooked in favor of sensational legends of blood oaths and toe-curling conspiracies. Dave Richards, an alum of Yale, sheds some light on the lesser known stories of Yale’s secret societies. He takes us through the history from Phi Beta Kappa in the American Revolution (originally a social and drinking society) through Skull and Bones and its rivals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there have been articles and books on some of those societies, there has never been a scholarly history of the system as a whole.
Chronicling Yale football from its 1872 inception to the present, this volume offers a comprehensive coverage of the most important games, including all Yale-Harvard contests, most Yale-Princeton games, record-making performances, great plays and more. Human-interest anecdotes offer a sidebar to the game or era covered, giving color to the storied history of Yale football. The evolution is traced of rules that transformed a game combining soccer and rugby into the football we know today.
In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from the Thames. His workshop became in its day the equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the country’s best in engineering talent. Their story of innovation and ambition tells how precision engineering made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.
From the American entry into World War II until September 1943, U.S. submarines experienced an abnormally high number of torpedo failures. These failures resulted from three defects present in the primary torpedo of the day, the Mark XIV. These defects were a tendency to run deeper than the set depth, the frequent premature detonation of the Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder, and the failure of the contact exploder when hitting a target at the textbook ninety-degree angle. Ironically, despite using a completely independent design, the Germans experienced the same three defects. The Germans, however, fixed their defects in six months, while it took the Americans twenty-two months. Much of the delay on the American side resulted from the denial of senior leaders in the operational forces and in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) that the torpedo itself was defective. Instead, they blamed crews for poor marksmanship or lack of training. In the end, however, the submarine force itself overcame the bureaucratic inertia and correctly identified and fixed the three problems on their own, proving once again the industry of the average American soldier or sailor. From the American entry into World War II until September 1943, U.S. submarines experienced an abnormally high number of torpedo failures. These failures resulted from three defects present in the primary torpedo of the day, the Mark XIV. These defects were a tendency to run deeper than the set depth, the frequent premature detonation of the magnetic influence exploder, and the failure of the contact exploder when hitting a target at the textbook 90-degree angle. Ironically, despite using a completely independent design, the Germans experienced the same three defects. The Germans, however, fixed their defects in six months, while it took the Americans 22 months. Much of the delay on the American side resulted from the denial of senior leaders in the operational forces and in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) that the torpedo itself was defective. Instead, they blamed crews for poor marksmanship or lack of training. In the end, however, the submarine force itself overcame the bureaucratic inertia and correctly identified and fixed the three problems on their own, proving once again the industry of the average American soldier or sailor. Contrary to the interpretations of most submarine historians, this book concludes that BuOrd did not sit idly by while torpedoes failed on patrol after patrol. BuOrd acknowledged problems from early in the war, but their processes and their tunnel vision prevented them from realizing that the weapon sent to the fleet was grossly defective. One of World War II's forgotten heroes, Admiral Lockwood drove the process for finding and fixing the three major defects. This is first book that deals exclusively with the torpedo problem, building its case out of original research from the archives of the Bureau of Ordnance, the Chief of Naval Operations, Vice Admiral Lockwood's personal correspondence, and records from the British Admiralty at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. These sources are complemented by correspondence and interviews with men who actually participated in the events.
From the voyage of the Argonauts to the Tailhook scandal, seafaring has long been one of the most glaringly male-dominated occupations. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Margaret Creighton, Lisa Norling, and their co-authors explore the relationship of gender and seafaring in the Anglo-American age of sail. Drawing on a wide range of American and British sources—from diaries, logbooks, and account ledgers to songs, poetry, fiction, and a range of public sources—the authors show how popular fascination with seafaring and the sailors' rigorous, male-only life led to models of gender behavior based on "iron men" aboard ship and "stoic women" ashore. Yet Iron Men, Wooden Women also offers new material that defies conventional views. The authors investigate such topics as women in the American whaling industry and the role of the captain's wife aboard ship. They explore the careers of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, as well as those of other women—"transvestite heroines"—who dressed as men to serve on the crews of sailing ships. And they explore the importance of gender and its connection to race for African American and other seamen in both the American and the British merchant marine. Contributors include both social historians and literary critics: Marcus Rediker, Dianne Dugaw, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Haskell Springer, W. Jeffrey Bolster, Laura Tabili, Lillian Nayder, and Melody Graulich, in addition to Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling.
Yale's great players and achievements are portrayed through rare and captivating images. With 26 national championships, two Heisman Trophy winners, and more than 800 victories, Yale football captures all the elements that make the sport so special.
