Mark Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. With their long winning streaks, distinctive traditions, and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. In so doing they have helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life.

American football is the most popular, and controversial, sport in the United States, and a massive industry. The NFL’s revenues are over $13 billion annually. The Super Bowl is watched by half of US television households and is televised in over 150 countries. Touchdown: An American Obsession is the first comprehensive guide to the history and culture of the sport, covering US college football as well as professional football worldwide. The editors and authors are among the world’s leading sports scholars. They cover race, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, and globalization, as well as recent scandals and controversies, the importance of television, and the art and aesthetics of the game. Touchdown: An American Obsession is a readable, authoritative guide for Americans as well as an introduction for people around the world.

This book is a revision/extension to the author's first book. With the recent availability of digitized old newspapers and magazines, much more foot ball data have been found for the 1800s. The games are again divided into three basic forms of foot ball; but now are listed under the actual style names used at the times played. They are the Kicking Game/Association Football (now soccer), Carrying Game/Boston Rules Game/American Rugby Game/ English Rugby Union (now rugby) and the Ball-Control Game/American Collegiate Game/American Rugby Football (now football).Within these basic forms, the games are listed under colleges, independent clubs and high schools. There is a chapter on leagues/conferences and the appendices contain team histories with the types of foot ball played.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.