Sports history has emerged as a popular study over the past quarter century, and scholars have fueled this interest by providing a wealth of information on baseball and its role in American culture. Despite this increasing focus on the connection between sports and societal values, football, the sport that emerged in the late nineteenth century and merged the values of winning and commercialization with the culture of higher education, has been left relatively unexplored. This gap in sports history has left many questions unanswered, including football's link to American cultural values. Gerald R. Gems has filled this gap in sports history with his latest title, For Pride, Profit, and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values. This intriguing resource covers a host of issues including the rise of football, football and feminism, militarism and leadership training, and multiculturalism in football. A broad and comprehensive analysis of the ways in which football addressed the cultural and ideological tensions within American society during its period of development and consolidation after the Civil War, this study is ideal for everyone from the football enthusiast to the general reader.

Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport explores the historical role of sport in the prescription for mental and physical health through the epidemic of neurasthenia, a debilitating neurological disorder that afflicted American society throughout the latter nineteenth century. Gerald R. Gems argues that the practice of sport and sport spectatorship, which grew concomitantly with the onset and spread of neurasthenia, provided both a physical preventative and a psychological escape to redress the perceived causes of the epidemic. Sports such as baseball, boxing, cycling, and football offered psychological relief from the stresses of a rapidly changing economic and social order. Cycling, in particular, provided women with the means to challenge the prescribed gender order of female domesticity, male hegemony, and the dictates of physically restrictive fashion. In the process, sport became a key component in the rise of feminism and a prescription for the epidemics that followed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify. The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture. This book unearths the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.

Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature explores an aspect of modern French literature that has been consistently overlooked in literary histories: the relationship between the colonies—their cultures, languages, and people—and formal shifts in French literary production. Starting from the premise that neither cultural identity nor cultural production can be pure or homogenous, Leslie Barnes initiates a new discourse on the French literary canon by examining the work of three iconic French writers with personal connections to Vietnam: André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Linda Lê. In a thorough investigation of the authors’ linguistic, metaphysical, and textual experiences of colonialism, Barnes articulates a new way of reading French literature: not as an inward-looking, homogenous, monolingual tradition, but rather as a tradition of intersecting and interdependent peoples, cultures, and experiences. One of the few books to focus on Vietnam’s position within francophone literary scholarship, Barnes challenges traditional concepts of French cultural identity and offers a new perspective on canonicity and the division between “French” and “francophone” literature.

Sports are a key expression of civic identity along the Ohio River and are a large part of any discussion of Cincinnati's heritage. Their significance helps us interpret the broader issues of economic and social classes, gender differences, race and ethnicity matters, politics, and community values-in short, sports help us understand ourselves. Covering the time period from the 19th century when German immigrants formed the first American Tuner societies for athletic training, and professional baseball developed to the current age of new ballparks and sports celebrities, Cincinnati on Field and Court takes a look at the place of sports in the cultural life of the Queen City. Included are professional teams like the Reds, Bengals, and Royals; legendary figures like Pete Rose, Oscar Robertson, and Ezzard Charles; dramatic moments like the 1919 World Series, the courageous story of Maurice Stokes, and the Olympic achievements of DeHart Hubbard; and social issues like the impact of women's sports and racial segregation and integration. The good, the bad, the foolish, the innovative, the tragic, and the inspiring are all covered.

American football and postmodernist theory are both objects of popular and scholarly interest that reveal remarkable sociological insights. Analysis of media-driven commercial football documents how narratives of sportsmanship/brutality, heroism/antiheroism, athleticism/self-indulgence, honor/chicanery, and chivalry/sexism compete and thrive.

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide an avenue for upward mobility. Kirsten Hextrum reveals the dynamic relationship between the state, elite groups, private entities, educational institutions, and athletic organizations that concentrate opportunities in white suburban communities. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their advantages through admission to elite universities.