Stagg's University


Book Description

For this first case study of college football by a social historian, Lester has brought life to the story of a university football program that had an unusual beginning, a glorious middle, and a unique and inglorious conclusion. The nation's first tenured coach and the most creative and entrepreneurial of all college coaches from the 1890s to the 1920s, Amos Alonzo Stagg headed a program marked by creation of the lettermans club and by the dominant use of the forward pass, of jersey numbers, and of the collegiate modern T formation. Stagg, who had been an all-American football player at Yale University, joined the company of nine former college or seminary presidents and academic notables including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Albert Michelson when he was named associate professor of physical culture and coach of the football team at the University of Chicago in 1892. Within fifteen years the charismatic Stagg had developed a program so powerful that more Americans knew of it than of the physics experiments of Michelson, who in 1907 became the first U.S. citizen to win the Nobel Prize. The logical commercial trail established by Stagg and University President William Rainey Harper helped change football into a mass entertainment industry on American campuses. This fascinating look at the birth of bigtime college sport shows how today s gridiron glory and scandal were prefigured in Chicago s football industry of the early twentieth century, presided over by the brilliant, combative, saintly, but very human Amos Alonzo Stagg.




Amos Alonzo Stagg: College Football's Man in Motion


Book Description

Inside the life of Amos Alonzo Stagg, a man who not only witnessed great change, but was responsible for much of it in college football. The arc of Amos Alonzo Stagg's life spanned the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. His career flourished on the Chicago Midway and found an encore on California's Pacific coast and in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Valley. Stagg pioneered use of the tackling dummy, the huddle, the forward pass, the shift, the man-in-motion, the quick kick and the short punt. He developed the raw talent of young men with little or no athletic background long before the age of scholarship athletes, and his championship teams at the University of Chicago established the school's national reputation before it became famous for producing Nobel laureates. He helped shape the modern Olympic Games, and the coaching tree he nurtured continues to bear fruit in football programs across the country. Author Jennifer Taylor Hall traces the remarkable life of the Grand Old Man of Football.




Sleeveless


Book Description

Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s. We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Café d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on Twitter that she had been hit with a drug possession charge, which she insisted was a scheme to keep her Weinstein dirt quiet. I hadn't even read her Weinstein story… I still wanted to know that the articles were being published, and in large quantities, but reading stories of abuse and humiliation was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn't feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless. I wanted to watch the patriarchy go up in flames, but I wasn't excited about what was being pitched to replace it. If we got all of it out in the open, what would we have left? My fear was that guilt would destroy the classics and there'd be no one left to fuck. All movies would be as low-budget and as puritanical as the stuff they play on Lifetime, all of New York would look like a Target ad, every book or article would be a cathartic tell-all, and I'd be sexually frustrated but too ashamed to hook up with assholes, or even to watch porn. —from Sleeveless Eve Babitz meets Roland Barthes in Sleeveless, Natasha Stagg's follow up to Surveys, her 2016 novel about internet fame. Composed of essays and stories commissioned by fashion, art, and culture magazines, Sleeveless is a scathing and sensitive report from New York in the 2010s. During those years, Stagg worked as an editor for V magazine and as a consultant, creating copy for fashion brands. Through these jobs, she met and interviewed countless industry luminaries, celebrities, and artists, and learned about the quickly evolving strategies of branding. In Sleeveless, she exposes the mechanics of personal identity and its monetization that propelled the narrator of Surveys from a mall job in Tucson to international travel and internet fame.




Stagg vs. Yost


Book Description

Corruption, scandals, and reports of wrongdoing in college football are constantly in the news. From Penn State’s Joe Paterno to Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, we have come to learn that some of the most lauded coaches don’t always live up to their saintly reputations. Perhaps no era of college football was ever more emblematic of this than the early 1900s, a time when coaches worked the system with merciless flair to recruit the best players and then keep them eligible to play, even while other coaches were trying to steal already-enrolled players from rival universities. Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago and Fielding H. Yost of the University of Michigan were no exception, and their bitter rivalry is one for the ages. In Stagg vs. Yost: The Birth of Cutthroat Football, John Kryk brings to life a story that is both timeless and familiar to all football fans, indeed to all sports fans: one man’s obsession to end the pain of a long losing streak to a hated rival. This is the story of how Amos Alonzo Stagg covertly punted many of the principles he espoused in order to dismantle one of the most powerful machines the game has known—Fielding Yost’s Michigan Wolverines. Kryk reveals the extent to which Stagg schemed to achieve victory against the “Point a Minute” Wolverines and the lengths Yost went to prevent that from happening. In addition, this book provides insight into college athletics’ corruption as a whole during this time, from under-the-table payments to recruits to contracted loans from wealthy boosters—and why the current NCAA rulebook contains page after page of recruiting and eligibility regulations. Featuring never-before-published internal correspondences of UM athletic leaders, Stagg’s surviving letters and notes, and reports from newspapers of the day, Stagg vs. Yost brings fresh insight into two legends of college football who would do almost anything to win. This book is a noteworthy and fascinating narrative for football fans, historians, and anyone interested in seeing where cutthroat college recruiting and coaching all began.




Good Books Matter


Book Description

Based on extensive research on the features that make children's books appealing and appropriate, this valuable teacher resource offers guidance on selecting books, strategies for specific grade levels, suggestions for extension, and tips for assessment. This teacher-friendly book is organized around the major genres — traditional literature, picture books, nonfiction, poetry, and multicultural texts — that will inspire young readers. Throughout the book, teachers will find suggestions for using literature to implement shared reading, reading aloud, and response strategies with emergent, developing, and independent readers. This comprehensive book is rooted in the belief that educators must consider and offer a wide range of choice to ensure that students read "good" books. It argues that the choices children make about what they read should be governed by their interests and desire to learn; not by a grade or reading level.







University Record


Book Description







Rites of Autumn


Book Description

Chronicles the history of college football from its first games in 1901 through the major tournaments of the twenty-first century.




Empire of Infields


Book Description

When the Empire of Japan defeated the Chinese Qing Dynasty in 1895 and won its first colony, Taiwan, it worked to establish it as a model colony. The Japanese brought Taiwan not only education and economic reform but also a new pastime made popular in Japan by American influence: baseball. But unlike in many other models, the introduction of baseball to Taiwan didn't lead to imperial indoctrination or nationalist resistance. Taiwan instead stands as a fascinating counterexample to an otherwise seemingly established norm in the cultural politics of modern imperialism. Taiwan's baseball culture evolved as a cultural hybrid between American, Japanese, and later Chinese influences. In Empire of Infields John J. Harney traces the evolution and identity of Taiwanese baseball, focusing on three teams: the Nenggao team of 1924-25, the Kan? team of 1931, and the Hongye schoolboy team of 1968. Baseball developed as an aspect of Japanese cultural practices that survived the end of Japanese rule at the end of World War II and was a central element of Japanese influence in the formation of popular culture across East Asia. The Republic of China (which reclaimed Taiwan in 1945) only embraced baseball in 1968 as an expression of a distinct Chinese nationalism and as a vehicle for political narratives. Empire of Infields explores not only the development of Taiwanese baseball but also the influence of baseball on Taiwan's cultural identity in its colonial years and beyond as a clear departure from narratives of assimilation and resistance.