American Football Bibliography

This is a working bibliography of academic work on American football. Included are articles, books, and book chapters from the various disciplines in sport humanities. I have provided links to articles and books when available. If you would like your book or article added to the list, please email me at adl5182@psu.edu. Enjoy!

High School Football

Books

Articles


Book Chapters

College and the Development of Football

Books

• Bernstein, Mark F. Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
• Gems, Gerald R. For Pride, Profit, and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values. Lanham, M.D.: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
• Ingrassia, Brian M. The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012.
• Kemper, Kurt Edward. College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
• Lester, Robin. Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
• Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
• Oriard, Michael. King Football: Sport and Spectacle In The Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, The Weekly and The Daily Press. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
• Oriard, Michael. Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Smith, Ronald A. Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
• Smith, Ronald A. Pay For Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
• Smith, Ronald A. Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Sperber, Murray. Onward To Victory: The Creation of Modern College Sports. New York: Henry Holt,1998. 
• Sperber, Murray. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
• Sperber, Murray. Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.
• Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Articles

• Doyle, Andrew. "Bear Bryant: Symbol for an Embattled South." Colby Quarterly 32(1) (March 1996): 72-86.
• Doyle, Andrew. "'Causes Won, Not Lost': College Football and the Modernization of the American South," International Journal of the History of Sport 11 (1994): 231-251.
• Doyle, Andrew. "Foolish and Useless Sport: The Southern Evangelical Crusade Against Intercollegiate Football." Journal of Sport History 24(3) (Fall 1997): 317-340.
  
• Doyle, Andrew. "Turning the Tide: College Football and Southern Progressivism." Southern Cultures 3 (1997): 28-51.
• Dunbay, Robert. “Pigmentation and Pigskin: A Jones County Dilemma.” The Journal of Mississippi History 44 (1984): 43-50.
• Dunbay, Robert. "Politics, Pigmentation, and Pigskin: The Georgia Tech Sugar Bowl Controversy of 1955." Atlanta History 39 (1995): 21-35.
• Kemper, Kurt Edward. "The Smell of Roses and the Color of the Players: College Football and the Expansion of the Civil Rights Movement in the West." Journal of Sport History 31(3) (Fall 2004): 317-339.
• Marcello, Robert. “The Integration of Intercollegiate Athletics in Texas: North Texas State College as a Test Case,1956.” Journal of Sport History 14 (1987): 286-316
• Martin, Charles H. "Integrating New Year's Day: The Racial Politics of College Bowl Games in the American South." Journal of Sport History 24(3) (Fall 1997): 358-377.
• Martin, Charles H. “Racial Change and ‘Big-Time’ College Football in Georgia: The Age of Segregation, 1892-1957.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (1996): 532-562.
• Martin, Charles H. “The Color Line in Midwestern College Sports, 1890-1960.” Indiana Magazine of History 98 (2002): 85-11.
• Miller, Patrick B. “Slouching towards a New Expediency: College Football and the Color Line during the Depression Decade.” American Studies 40(3) (Fall 1999): 5-30.
• Moore, John Hammond. "Football's Ugly Decades, 1893-1913." Smithsonian Journal of History 2 (Fall 1967): 49-68.
• Odenkirk, James E. "The Eight Wonder of the World: Ohio State University's Rejection of a Rose Bowl Bid in 1961." Journal of Sport History 34(3) (Fall 2007): 389-395.
• Pearlman, Michael. "To Make the University Safe for Morality: Higher Education, Football and Military Training from the 1890s through the 1920s." The Canadian Review of American Studies 12(1) (Spring 1981): 39-56.
• Riesman, David and Reuel Denney. "Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion." American Quarterly 3(4) (Winter 1951): 309-325.
• Schultz, Jaime. "'A Wager Concerning a Diplomatic Pig': A Crooked Reading of the Floyd of Rosedale Narrative." Journal of Sport History 32(1) (Spring 2005): 1-21.
• Schultz, Jaime. "Jack Trice Stadium and the Politics of Memory." International Journal of the History of Sport 24 (2007): 715-748.
• Schultz, Jaime. "The Legend of Jack Trice and the Campaign for Jack Trice Stadium, 1973-1984." Journal of Social History 41(4) (Summer 2008): 997-1029.
• Smith, Ronald A. "Harvard and Columbia and a Reconsideration of the 1905-06 Football Crisis." Journal of Sport History 8(3) (Winter 1981): 5-19.
• Smith, Ronald A. "Intercollegiate Athletics/Football History at the Dawn of a New Century." Journal of Sport History 29(2) (Summer 2002): 229-239.
• Smith, Ronald A. "Sport, Politics, and Harvard: A Little Lesson in Honor for Teddy Roosevelt." The New England Quarterly 54(3) (September 1981): 412-416.
• Synnott, Marcia G. "The 'Big Three' and the Harvard-Princeton Football Break, 1926-1934." Journal of Sport History 3(2) (1976): 188-202.
• Watterson, John M. "Football at the University of Virginia, 1951-1961: A Perfect Gridiron Storm." Journal of Sport History 34(3) (Fall 2007): 375-387.
• Watterson, John M. "The Death of Archer Christian: College Presidents and the Reform of College Football." Journal of Sport History 22 (1995): 149-167.
  
• Watterson, John M. "The Football Crisis of 1909-1910: The Response of the Eastern 'Big Three.'" Journal of Sport History 8(1) (Spring 1981)
• Watterson, John S. "The Gridiron Crisis of 1905: Was It Really a Crisis?" Journal of Sport History 27(2) (Summer 2000): 291-298.
• Wellborn, Brent. “Coach Paul Bryant and the Integration of the University of Alabama Football Team.” Southern Historian 18 (1997): 66-80
  
• Yeakey, "Lamont H. "A Student without Peer: The Undergraduate College Years of Paul Robeson." Journal of Negro Education 42 (1973): 489-503.

Book Chapters

• Doyle, Andrew. "An Atheist in Alabama Is Someone Who Doesn't Believe in Bear Bryant: A Symbol for an Embattled South." In The Sporting World of the Modern South. Ed. Patrick Miller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 247-258.

Professional Football

Books

• Carroll, John M. Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
• Carroll, John M. Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
• Coenen, Craig R. From Sandlots to the Super Bowl: The National Football League, 1920-1967. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.
• Maltby, Marc S. The Origins and Early Development of Professional Football. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
• Maraniss, David. When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
• McClellan, Keith. The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football. Akron, O.H.: Akron University Press, 1998.
• O'Brien, Michael. Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi. New York: William Morrow, 1989.
• Oriard, Michael. Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 2010.
• Vogan, Travis. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Articles

• Adelman, Melvin L. "Making Money (Lots of It) In Professional Football in the Late 1940s: The Case of the 1946 Cleveland Browns." Football Studies 7(1/2) (2004): 11-36.
• Bloom, John D. "Joe Namath and Super Bowl III: An Interpretation of Style." Journal of Sport History 15(1) (Spring 1988): 64-74.
• Byrd, Jennifer and Max Utsler. "Is Stereotypical Coverage of African-American Athletes as 'Dead as Disco'?: An Analysis of NFL Quarterbacks in the Pages of Sports Illustrated." Journal of Sports Media  2 (2007): 1-28.
• Ciotola, Nicholas P. "Spignesi, Sinatra, and the Pittsburgh Steelers: Franco's Italian Army as an Expression of Ethnic Identity, 1972-1977." Journal of Sport History 27(2) (Summer 2000): 271-289.
• Cuneo, Ernest L. "Present at the Creation: Professional Football in the Twenties." American Scholar 56 (Autumn 1987): 487-501.
• Creedon, Pam. "The Super Bowl and War: Chance in the Theatre for the Masculine Myth." Football Studies 7 (1/2) (2004): 108-121.
• Friedman, Michael T. and Daniel S. Mason. "'Horse Trading' and Consensus Building: Nashville, Tennessee and the Relocation of the Houston Oilers." Journal of Sport History 28(2) (Summer 2001): 271-291.
• Gudelunas, William and Stephen R. Couch. "The Stolen Championship of the Pottsville Maroons: A Case Study in the Emergence of Modern Professional Football." Journal of Sport History 9(1) (Spring 1982): 53-64.
• Jable, J. Thomas. "The Birth of Professional Football: Pittsburgh Athletic Clubs Ring In Professionals In 1892." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 62 (April 1979): 136-147.
• Linden, Andrew D. “Looking at Losing: Presentations of the Media’s Narrative of the Cleveland Browns’ Relocation.” International Journal of the History of Sport 29(18) (December 2012): 2575-2598.
  
• Lomax, Michael E. "Conflict and Compromist: The Evolution of American Professional Football's Labour Relations 1957-1966." Football Studies 4(1) (April 2001): 5-39.
• Lomax, Michael E. "'Detrimental to the League': Gambling and the Governance of Professional Football, 1946-1963." Journal of Sport History 29(2) (Summer 2002): 289-311.
• Lomax, Michael E. "The Quest for Freedom: The NFLPA's Attempt to Abolish the NFL's Reserve System." Football Studies 7 (1/2) (2004): 70-107.
• Oriard, Michael. "Doing Economic and Labour History: Professional Football in Post World War II America." Football Studies 7(1/2) (2004): 5-10.
• Scott, Jr., Frank A., James E. Long, and Ken Somppi. "Free Agency, Owner Incentives, and the National Football League Players Association." Journal of Labour Research 4(3) (Summer 1983): 257-266.
• Smith, Leverett T. "Norman Mailer and the NFL: A Reading of The Armies of the Night." Journal of Sport History 3(1) (1976): 20-34.
• Smith, Thomas G. "Civil Rights on the Gridiron: The Kennedy Administration and the Washington Redskins." Journal of Sport History 14(2) (Summer 1987): 189-208.
• Smith, Thomas G. "Outside the Pale: The Exclusion of Blacks From Organized Professional Football, 1934-1946." Journal of Sport History 15(3) (Winter 1988): 255-281.
• Suchma, Philip. "Losing Is a Work of 'Art': Professional Football and the Civic Promoter in Cleveland." Football Studies 7 (1/2) (2004): 37-69.

Book Chapters

Other

Books

• Oriard, Michael. The End of Autumn: Reflections on My Life in Football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, 2009.