front cover of Taking Flight
Taking Flight
A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America
Michael Edmonds
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
A dynamic account of ornithological history in America’s heartland.    

Today, more than fifty million Americans traipse through wetlands at dawn, endure clouds of mosquitoes, and brave freezing autumn winds just to catch a glimpse of a bird. The human desire to connect with winged creatures defies age and generation. In the Midwest, humans and birds have lived together for more than twelve thousand years. Taking Flight explores how and why people have worshipped, feared, studied, hunted, eaten, and protected the birds that surrounded them.

Author and birder Michael Edmonds has combed archaeological reports, missionaries’ journals, travelers’ letters, early scientific treatises, the memoirs of American Indian elders, and the folklore of hunters, farmers, and formerly enslaved people throughout the Midwest to reveal how our ancestors thought about the very same birds we see today. Whether you’re a casual bird-watcher, a hard-core life-lister, or simply someone who loves the outdoors, you’ll look at birds differently after reading this book.
 
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Taking The Field
Women, Men, and Sports
Michael A. Messner
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A hard-hitting look at the persistent inequities in women's sports participation. In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls' and women's dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations. To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men's violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men's investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport. Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions-interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport. "For many years, Michael Messner has provided unparalleled insights into gender issues in the arena of sport. With Taking the Field he opens our eyes and ears to how much work still lies ahead before girls and women truly take the field with equal societal approval as boys and men. We're thirty years beyond the passing of Title IX, but when you read Taking the Field, you realize we're not yet where we want to be." --Diana Nyad Michael A. Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. His previous books include Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (1995) and Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements (1997).
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Teaching U.S. History through Sports
Edited by Brad Austin and Pamela Grundy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Few areas of study offer more insight into American culture than competitive sports. The games played throughout this nation's history dramatically illuminate social, economic, and cultural developments, from the balance of power in world affairs to changing conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality.
Teaching U.S. History through Sports provides strategies for incorporating sports into any U.S. history curriculum. Drawing upon their own classroom experiences, the authors suggest creative ways to use sports as a lens to examine a broad range of historical subjects, including Puritan culture, the rise of Jim Crow, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. Essays focus on the experiences of African American women, working-class southerners, Latinos, and members of LGBTQ communities, as well as topics including the controversy over Native American mascots and the globalization of U.S. sports.
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Team Chemistry
The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball
Nathan Corzine
University of Illinois Press, 2016
In 2007, the Mitchell Report shocked traditionalists who were appalled that drugs had corrupted the "pure" game of baseball. Nathan Corzine rescues the story of baseball's relationship with drugs from the sepia-toned tyranny of such myths. In Team Chemistry , he reveals a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from the day the first pitch was thrown. Indeed, throughout the game's history, stars and scrubs alike partook of a pharmacopeia that helped them stay on the field and cope off of it:
  • In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived "elixir" to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games.
  • Sandy Koufax needed Codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch through his late-career elbow woes.
  • Players returning from World War II mainstreamed the use of the amphetamines they had used as servicemen.
  • Vida Blue invited teammates to cocaine parties, Tim Raines used it to stay awake on the bench, and Will McEnaney snorted it between innings.
Corzine also ventures outside the lines to show how authorities handled--or failed to handle--drug and alcohol problems, and how those problems both shaped and scarred the game. The result is an eye-opening look at what baseball's relationship with substances legal and otherwise tells us about culture, society, and masculinity in America.
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The Team That Changed Baseball
Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates
Bruce Markusen
Westholme Publishing, 2006

The Inspiring Story of Roberto Clemente's Greatest Season and One of the Most Important Teams in Sport History
In 1947, major league baseball experienced its first measure of integration when the Brooklyn Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson to the National League. While Robinson's breakthrough opened the gates of opportunity for African Americans and other minority players, the process of integration proved slow and uneven. It was not until the 1960s that a handful of major league teams began to boast more than a few Black and Latino players. But the 1971 World Championship team enjoyed a full and complete level of integration, with half of its twenty-five-man roster comprised of players of African American and Latino descent. That team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, managed by an old-time Irishman.

In The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, veteran baseball writer Bruce Markusen tells the story of one of the most likable and significant teams in the history of professional sports. In addition to the fact that they fielded the first all-minority lineup in major league history, the 1971 Pirates are noteworthy for the team's inspiring individual performances, including those of future Hall of Famers Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Bill Mazeroski, and their remarkable World Series victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. But perhaps their greatest legacy is the team's influence on the future of baseball, inspiring later championship teams such as the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics to open their doors fully to all talented players, regardless of race, particularly in the new era of free agency.

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The Temple of Perfection
A History of the Gym
Eric Chaline
Reaktion Books, 2015
These days there is only one right answer when someone asks you what you are doing after work. Hitting the gym! With an explosion of apps, clothing, devices, and countless DVDs, fitness has never felt more modern, and the gym is its holy laboratory, alive with machinery, sweat, and dance music. But we are far from the first to pursue bodily perfection—the gymnasium dates back 2,800 years, to the very beginnings of Western civilization. In The Temple of Perfection, Eric Chaline offers the first proper consideration of the gym’s complex, layered history and the influence it has had on the development of Western individualism, society, education, and politics.
           
As Chaline shows, how we take care of our bodies has long been based on a complex mix of spiritual beliefs, moral discipline, and aesthetic ideals that are all entangled with political, social, and sexual power. Today, training in a gym is seen primarily as part of the pursuit of individual fulfillment. As he shows, however, the gym has always had a secondary role in creating men and women who are “fit for purpose”—a notion that has meant a lot of different things throughout history. Chaline surveys the gym’s many incarnations and the ways the individual, the nation-state, the media, and the corporate world have intersected in its steamy confines, sometimes with unintended consequences. He shows that the gym is far more than a factory for superficiality and self-obsession—it is one of the principle battlefields of humanity’s social, sexual, and cultural wars.
Exploring the gym’s history from a multitude of perspectives, Chaline concludes by looking toward its future as it struggles to redefine itself in a world in thrall to quick fixes—such as plastic surgery and pharmaceuticals—meant to attain the gym’s ultimate promises: physical fitness and beauty. 
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Temples of the Earthbound Gods
Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires
By Christopher Thomas Gaffney
University of Texas Press, 2008

In Rio de Janeiro, the spiritual home of world football, and Buenos Aires, where a popular soccer club president was recently elected mayor, the game is an integral part of national identity. Using the football stadium as an illuminating cultural lens, Temples of the Earthbound Gods examines many aspects of urban culture that play out within these monumental architectural forms, including spirituality, violence, rigid social norms, anarchy, and also expressions of sexuality and gender.

Tracing the history of the game in Brazil and Argentina through colonial influences as well as indigenous ball courts in Mayan, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Olmec societies, Christopher Gaffney's study spans both ancient and contemporary worlds, linking the development of stadiums to urbanization and the consolidation of nation building in two of Latin America's most intriguing megacities.

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Tennis
A History from American Amateurs to Global Professionals
Greg Ruth
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Analyzing how tennis turned pro

The arrival of the Open era in 1968 was a watershed in the history of tennis--the year that marked its advent as a professionalized sport. Merging wide-angle history with individual stories of players and off-the-court figures, Greg Ruth charts tennis’s evolution into the game we watch today. His vivid account moves from the cloistered world of nineteenth-century lawn tennis through the longtime amateur-professional divide and the battles over commercialization that raged from the 1920s until 1968. From there, Ruth details the post-1968 expansion of the game as it was transformed by bankable superstars, a popular women’s tour, rival governing bodies, and sponsorship money. What emerges is a fascinating history of the economics and politics that made tennis a decisive, if unlikely, force in the creation of modern-day sports entertainment.

Comprehensive and engaging, Tennis tells the interlocking stories of the figures and factors that birthed the professional game.

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Tennis Science
How Player and Racket Work Together
Bruce Elliott, Machar Reid, and Miguel Crespo
University of Chicago Press, 2015
If you have watched a Grand Slam tennis tournament in the past decade, you are probably aware that the game is dominated by just a few international powerhouses. At the conclusion of each tournament, it is likely that you will see Serena Williams atop the women’s podium and a member of the Big Four—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray—hoisting the trophy for the men. And while there is not a lot of variety in the outcome of these matches, the game of tennis itself has changed drastically over the decades, as developments in technology and conditioning regimens, among other factors, have altered the style of play. Underpinning many of these developments is science, and this book explains the scientific wonders that take the ball from racket to racket and back again.
           
Each chapter explores a different facet of the game—learning, technique, game analysis, the mental edge, physical development, nutrition for performance and recovery, staying healthy, and equipment—and is organized around a series of questions. How do we learn the ins and outs of hitting the ball in and not out? What are the main technological developments and software programs that can be used to assist in performance and notational analysis in tennis? What role does sports psychology play in developing a tennis player? What is the role of fluid replacement for the recreational, junior, and professional player? What rule changes have been made with respect to the racket, ball, and ball-court interaction to maintain the integrity of the game in the face of technological change? Each question is examined with the aid of explanatory diagrams and illustrations, and the book can be used to search for particular topics, or read straight through for a comprehensive overview of how player and equipment work together.
         
Whether you prefer the grass courts of Wimbledon, the clay courts of the French Open, or the hard courts of the US and Australian Opens, Tennis Science is a must-have for anyone interested in the science behind a winning game.
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Testing for Athlete Citizenship
Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport
Henne, Kathryn E
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Incidents of doping in sports are common in news headlines, despite regulatory efforts. How did doping become a crisis? What does a doping violation actually entail? Who gets punished for breaking the rules of fair play? In Testing for Athlete Citizenship, Kathryn E. Henne, a former competitive athlete and an expert in the law and science of anti-doping regulations, examines the development of rules aimed at controlling performance enhancement in international sports. 
 
As international and celebrated figures, athletes are powerful symbols, yet few spectators realize that a global regulatory network is in place in an attempt to ensure ideals of fair play. The athletes caught and punished for doping are not always the ones using performance-enhancing drugs to cheat. In the case of female athletes, violations of fair play can stem from their inherent biological traits. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, Testing for Athlete Citizenship offers a compelling account of the origins and expansion of anti-doping regulation and gender-verification rules. 
 
Drawing on research conducted in Australasia, Europe, and North America, Henne provides a detailed account of how race, gender, class, and postcolonial formations of power shape these ideas and regulatory practices. Testing for Athlete Citizenship makes a convincing case to rethink the power of regulation in sports and how it separates athletes as a distinct class of citizens subject to a unique set of rules because of their physical attributes and abilities. 
 
 
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Texas Sports
Unforgettable Stories for Every Day of the Year
By Chad S. Conine
University of Texas Press, 2017

When it comes to sports, Texas more than earns its bragging rights. The Lone Star State has produced championship teams and legendary athletes not only in football, baseball, and basketball, but in dozens of other sports as well. Texas Sports celebrates more than a century of achievements in a day-by-day record of the people and events—both unforgettable and little-known—that have made Texas a powerhouse in the world of sports.

Chad S. Conine packs a wealth of sports facts and stories into 366 days. He ranges from firsts such as UT’s first football game (an 1893 win against Dallas University Football Club) to peak moments such as Earl Campbell running through defenders, Nolan Ryan throwing heat past baffled batters, and Babe Didrickson Zaharias winning the Western Open golf championship for the fourth time. Conine covers more than twenty-five sports and all levels from high school to professional, reminding us that if Texas had never seen a pigskin or a backboard, its sports legacy would still be secure. With a winning combination of victories and heartbreaks, men’s and women’s sports, and all regions of the state, Texas Sports is a must-read for all sports fans and trivia buffs.

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That Futebol Feeling
Sport and Play in Brazil's Heartland
David Faflik
Temple University Press, 2025

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There Will Always Be Boxing
Another Year Inside the Sweet Science
Thomas Hauser
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
In 2016, Booklist observed, “Thomas Hauser is a treasure. Whatever he writes is worth reading. Boxing is blessed that he has focused so much of his career on the sweet science.”

There Will Always Be Boxing continues this tradition of excellence. A poignant look at Muhammad Ali—whose life was celebrated throughout the world following his death on June 3, 2016—highlights this collection of Hauser’s work. The year’s biggest fights are, as always, put in perspective. And once again, Hauser takes readers behind the scenes, giving them a seat at the table with boxing’s biggest power brokers as he reveals the inner workings of the sport and business of boxing.

There Will Always Be Boxing is sure not to disappoint the readers, writers, and critics who look forward to Hauser’s annual collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. This collection shows, once again, why Hauser is one of the last real champions of boxing and one of the very best who has ever written about the sport.

 
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There You Have It
The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell
John Bloom
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
This is the first full-length biography of the lawyer-turned-sports journalist whose brash style and penchant for social commentary changed the way American sporting events are reported. Perhaps best known for his close relationship with the world champion boxer Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell became a celebrity in his own right during the 1960s and 1970s-the bombastic, controversial, instantly recognizable sportscaster everyone "loved to hate."

Raised in Brooklyn in a middle-class Jewish family, Cosell carried with him a deeply ingrained sense of social justice. Yet early on he abandoned plans for a legal career to become a pioneer in sports broadcasting, first in radio and then in television. The first white TV reporter to address the former Cassius Clay by his chosen Muslim name, Cosell was also the first sportscaster to conduct locker room interviews with professional athletes, using a tape recorder purchased with his own money. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, he not only defended the fisted "Black Power" salutes of American track medalists John Carlos and Tommie Smith, but he publicly excoriated Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage for "hypocritical," racist policies. He was also instrumental in launching ABC's Monday Night Football, a prime-time sports program that evolved into an American cultural institution.

Yet while Cosell took courageous stands on behalf of civil rights and other causes, he could be remarkably blind to the inconsistencies in his own life. In this way, John Bloom argues, he embodied contradictions that still resonate widely in American society today.
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They Came to Bowl
How Milwaukee Became America’s Tenpin Capital
Doug Schmidt
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007

A frozen rope. A urethane split on the drives. Chicken tracks on the telescore.* Do you know your bowling lingo? You will along with much more when you read They Came to Bowl: How Milwaukee Became America's Tenpin Capital. From the thrill of the perfect strike to the agony of a ball gone astray, anyone who has rolled a ball down the lanes will find themselves or someone they know in the people, places and stories covered in this book.

In this authoritative and lively book, Doug Schmidt traces bowling's roots from a German religious rite centuries ago to the sport that made Milwaukee famous. From the taverns and saloons that housed recreational games to the sell-out crowds and million-dollar beer sponsorships of televised tournaments, this well-illustrated book covers both sport and city, charting the changing face of bowling over the century. Packed with memorable showdowns and improbable heroes, They Came to Bowl will take you back to the changing lanes of bowling in Milwaukee — and the sport as a whole.

* frozen rope=a ball rolled with excessive speed almost straight to the pocket; urethane split=2-8-10 or 3-7-9 split caused by sharp breaking point of reactive resin balls; drives=alleys; chicken tracks=string of strikes

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They Came to Play
A Photographic History of Colorado Baseball
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2012
Over one hundred and thirty years ago, pioneers arriving in Colorado during the Civil War era brought the game of baseball to the high and dry Rocky Mountains frontier. From the days of games in pastures with no gloves to the high drama of Coors Field and the Colorado Rockies, baseball and Coloradans have had a love affair that has continued to flourish over the decades.

In They Came To Play: A Photographic History of Colorado Baseball, historians and avid baseball fans Duane Smith and Mark Foster have collected the finest historic baseball photographs of teams, players, and games from around the state. They are all here, the town teams, company teams, early professional clubs, and the ethnic teams that made baseball an integral part of the life and times in Colorado's mountain towns, prairie hamlets, and bustling frontier cities. Combined with the wonderful photographs and captions is an essay that brings baseball's rich heritage in Colorado to life for the reader.

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Third Down and a War to Go
Terry Frei
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007

On December 11, 1941, All-American football player Dave Schreiner wrote to his parents, "I'm not going to sit here snug as a bug, playing football, when others are giving their lives for their country. ... If everyone tried to stay out of it, what a fine country we'd have!" Schreiner didn't stay out of it. Neither did his Wisconsin Badger teammates, including friend and co-captain Mark "Had" Hoskins and standouts "Crazylegs" Hirsch and Pat Harder. After that legendary 1942 season, the Badgers scattered to serve, fight, and even die around the world.

This fully revised edition of the popular hardcover includes follow-up research and updates about many of the '42 Badgers, plus a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Maraniss. Readers and reviewers agree: Terry Frei's heart-wrenching story of Schreiner and his band of brothers is much more than one team's tale. It's an All-American story.

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Thomas Hauser on Boxing
Another Year Inside the Sweet Science
Thomas Hauser
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
Booklist called Straight Writes and Jabs, last year’s collection of boxing articles by Thomas Hauser, “wonderful writing from a world-class journalist.” This year’s collection, Thomas Hauser on Boxing, is the latest in the popular annuals bringing together all Hauser’s writing from the previous year. Readers will enter the dressing room with elite champions in the moments before some of 2013’s biggest fights. Hauser’s award-winning investigative journalism is on display in his prize-winning exposé of the tragedy that befell heavyweight boxer Magomed Abdusalamov. There’s a look at the incomparable Don King in the twilight of his career, and much more.
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Thomas Hauser on Sports
Remembering the Journey
Thomas Hauser
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
Thomas Hauser is best known as Muhammad Ali's biographer and for his recording of the contemporary boxing scene. Booklist called Hauser "the most respected boxing journalist working today and perhaps the best ever." Robert Lipsyte said Hauser is "the best boxing writer of our time." Still, Hauser's love of sports began not with boxing but with baseball. Long before he turned to the sweet science, America's national pastime had captured his heart. His childhood allegiance was to the New York Yankees. Growing up in the suburbs of New York, he cheered for the Giants in football and Knicks in basketball. In college, the often-hapless Columbia Lions became his cause. Thomas Hauser on Sports brings together Hauser's articles on sports other than boxing. It combines personal memories with issue-oriented commentary and an intimate look at some of the most remarkable athletes of modern times. Hauser has dealt one-on-one with Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, Pete Rose, Arthur Ashe, Wilt Chamberlain, and other giants of sports. He has crossed swords with the likes of Marvin Miller and Howard Cosell. Thomas Hauser on Sports is a remarkable journey that begins in the days of Hauser's youth and follows the games we play into the era of steroids and multi-billion-dollar television contracts.
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A Thousand Deer
Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country
By Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 2012

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass’s family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—“the Deer Pasture”—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.

The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass’s boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

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Thousand-Miler
Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail
Melanie Radzicki McManus
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

In thirty-six thrilling days, Melanie Radzicki McManus hiked 1,100 miles around Wisconsin, landing her in the elite group of Ice Age Trail thru-hikers known as the Thousand-Milers. In prose that’s alternately harrowing and humorous, Thousand-Miler takes you with her through Wisconsin’s forests, prairies, wetlands, and farms, past the geologic wonders carved by long-ago glaciers, and into the neighborhood bars and gathering places of far-flung small towns. Follow along as she worries about wildlife encounters, wonders if her injured feet will ever recover, and searches for an elusive fellow hiker known as Papa Bear. Woven throughout her account are details of the history of the still-developing Ice Age Trail—one of just eleven National Scenic Trails—and helpful insight and strategies for undertaking a successful thru-hike.

In addition to chronicling McManus’s hike, Thousand-Miler also includes the little-told story of the Ice Age Trail’s first-ever thru-hiker Jim Staudacher, an account of the record-breaking thru-run of ultrarunner Jason Dorgan, the experiences of a young combat veteran who embarked on her thru-hike as a way to ease back into civilian life, and other fascinating tales from the trail. Their collective experiences shed light on the motivations of thru-hikers and the different ways hikers accomplish this impressive feat, providing an entertaining and informative read for outdoors enthusiasts of all levels.

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Through the Mountains
The French Broad River and Time
John E. Ross
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Two generations have passed since the publication of Wilma Dykeman’s landmark environmental history, The French Broad. In Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time, John Ross updates that seminal book with groundbreaking new research. More than the story of a single river, Through the Mountains covers the entire watershed from its headwaters in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains to its mouth in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The French Broad watershed has faced new perils and seen new discoveries since 1955, when The French Broad was published. Geologists have learned that the Great Smoky Mountains are not among the world’s oldest as previously thought; climatologists and archaeologists have traced the dramatic effects of global warming and cooling on the flora, fauna, and human habitation in the watershed; and historians have deepened our understanding of enslaved peoples once thought not to be a part of the watershed’s history. Even further, this book documents how the French Broad and its tributaries were abused by industrialists, and how citizens fought to mitigate the pollution.

Through the Mountains also takes readers to notable historic places: the hidden mound just inside the gate of Biltmore where Native Americans celebrated the solstices; the once-secret radio telescope site above Rosman where NASA eavesdropped on Russian satellites; and the tiny hamlet of Gatlinburg where Phi Beta Phi opened its school for mountain women in 1912.

Wilma Dykeman once asked what the river had meant to the people who lived along it. In the close of Through the Mountains, Ross reframes that question: For 14,000 years the French Broad and its tributaries have nurtured human habitation. What must we start doing now to ensure it will continue to nourish future generations? Answering this question requires a knowledge of the French Broad’s history, an understanding of its contemporary importance, and a concern for the watershed’s sustainable future. Through the Mountains fulfills these three criteria, and, in many ways, presents the larger story of America’s freshwater habitats through the incredible history of the French Broad.

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Thursday Night Lights
The Story of Black High School Football in Texas
By Michael Hurd
University of Texas Press, 2019

At a time when “Friday night lights” shone only on white high school football games, African American teams across Texas burned up the gridiron on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The segregated high schools in the Prairie View Interscholastic League (the African American counterpart of the University Interscholastic League, which excluded black schools from membership until 1967) created an exciting brand of football that produced hundreds of outstanding players, many of whom became college All-Americans, All-Pros, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, including NFL greats such as “Mean” Joe Green (Temple Dunbar), Otis Taylor (Houston Worthing), Dick “Night Train” Lane (Austin Anderson), Ken Houston (Lufkin Dunbar), and Bubba Smith (Beaumont Charlton-Pollard).

Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers fifty years (1920–1970) of high school football history, including championship seasons and legendary rivalries such as the annual Turkey Day Classic game between Houston schools Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley, which drew standing-room-only crowds of up to 40,000, making it the largest prep sports event in postwar America. In telling this story, Hurd explains why the PVIL was necessary, traces its development, and shows how football offered a potent source of pride and ambition in the black community, helping black kids succeed both athletically and educationally in a racist society.

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A Tiger Walk through History
The Complete Story of Auburn Football from 1892 to the Tuberville Era
Paul Hemphill
University of Alabama Press, 2008

In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and Auburn alum Paul Hemphill tells the story of the progress of Auburn from that first game coached by Auburn legend George Petrie through the team’s growth and development into the national force it is today. Hemphill records the many highs and occasional lows, and the heartbreak and jubilation each caused, noting the standouts great and small on the way.

A Tiger Walk through History contains 172 photographs, many of them rare and surprising. The text and photos capture the many great players and coaches in the Auburn football experience: Auburn’s first bowl appearance in 1936; coaching eras of innovative football genius John Heisman, after whom the Heisman trophy is named;  “Iron Mike” Donahue; Ralph “Shug” Jordan, who brought Auburn its first national championship in 1957; Pat Dye, Terry Bowden, and present coach Tommy Tuberville; Auburn’s two Heisman trophy winners Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson; and victories over rivals Alabama and Georgia. The 2007-2008 season is highlighted, including the sixth straight win over Alabama and a bowl victory over Clemson. As the game has grown, Auburn and its team have grown with it, and Auburn now ranks as a perennial power both in its conference and in the nation.

Vince Dooley states in his foreword that “beyond the famous coaches and players and their heroics on behalf of the Orange and Blue, A Tiger Walk through History is also about time-honored traditions—rallying cries like ‘Sullivan-to-Beasley’ and ‘Punt Bama Punt’ and ‘Rolling Toomer’s Corner’—that echo in resounding fashion from the pages of Paul Hemphill’s remarkable book.”

No fan, whether casual or devoted, can afford to miss this riveting account of the Plainsmen’s journey from the very beginning to today, which is the record of a great university as well as the story of the development of a great football team.

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Time and Change
150 Years of The Ohio State University
Tamar Chute
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
This photographic retrospective of The Ohio State University showcases its rich history and decades of growth, from its earliest years as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College to the prominent land-grant institution it is today. The book includes more than three hundred rarely seen photographs from the collections of the University Archives and contemporary university photographers.
 
Gain a visually stunning new perspective on iconic landmarks such as Mirror Lake, the Oval, Ohio Stadium, and the neighborhoods surrounding the Columbus and regional campuses. From beloved teams, symbols, and traditions to scenes from academic and campus life, reflect on time and change and rediscover the extraordinary connection that unites generations of Buckeyes.
 
 
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Tinker to Evers to Chance
The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America
David Rapp
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Their names were chanted, crowed, and cursed. Alone they were a shortstop, a second baseman, and a first baseman. But together they were an unstoppable force. Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance came together in rough-and-tumble early twentieth-century Chicago and soon formed the defensive core of the most formidable team in big league baseball, leading the Chicago Cubs to four National League pennants and two World Series championships from 1906 to 1910. At the same time, baseball was transforming from small-time diversion into a nationwide sensation. Americans from all walks of life became infected with “baseball fever,” a phenomenon of unprecedented enthusiasm and social impact. The national pastime was coming of age.

Tinker to Evers to Chance examines this pivotal moment in American history, when baseball became the game we know today. Each man came from a different corner of the country and brought a distinctive local culture with him: Evers from the Irish-American hothouse of Troy, New York; Tinker from the urban parklands of Kansas City, Missouri; Chance from the verdant fields of California’s Central Valley. The stories of these early baseball stars shed unexpected light not only on the evolution of baseball and on the enthusiasm of its players and fans all across America, but also on the broader convulsions transforming the US into a confident new industrial society. With them emerged a truly national culture.

This iconic trio helped baseball reinvent itself, but their legend has largely been relegated to myths and barroom trivia. David Rapp’s engaging history resets the story and brings these men to life again, enabling us to marvel anew at their feats on the diamond. It’s a rare look at one of baseball’s first dynasties in action.
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Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee's Trailblazers
50 Years, 50 Stories
Mary Ellen Pethel
University of Tennessee Press, 2022
In June 1972, President Richard Nixon put pen to paper and signed the Educational Amendments of 1972 into law. The nearly 150-page document makes no mention of “gender,” “athletics,” “girls,” or “women.” The closest reference to “sport” is transportation. In fact, the bill did not appear to contain anything earth shattering. But tucked into its final pages, a heading appears, “Title IX—Prohibition of Sex Discrimination.” These 37 words would change the world for girls and women across the United States. On its face, Title IX legally guaranteed equal opportunity in education. In time, Title IX would serve as the tipping point for the modern era of women’s sport. Slowly but surely, women’s athletics at the high school and collegiate levels grew to prominence, and Tennessee fast emerged as a national leader.
 
In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, Mary Ellen Pethel introduces readers to past and present pioneers—each instrumental to the success of women’s athletics across the state and nation. Through vibrant profiles, Pethel celebrates the lives and careers of household names like Pat Summitt and Candace Parker, as well as equally important forerunners such as Ann Furrow and Teresa Phillips. Through their lived experiences, these fifty individuals laid the foundation for athletic excellence in Tennessee, which in turn shaped the national landscape for women’s sports. The book also provides readers with a fuller understanding of Title IX, as well as a concise history of women’s athletics in the pre- and post-Title IX eras.

With interviewees ranging from age 20 to 93, Pethel artfully combines storytelling with scholarship. Guided by the voices of the athletes, coaches, and administrators, Pethel vividly documents achievement and adversity, wins and losses, and advice for the next generation. This book represents the first statewide compilation of its kind—offering readers a behind-the- scenes perspective of Tennessee women who dedicated their lives to the advancement of sport and gender equality. Readers will delight in Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers: 50 Years, 50 Stories.
 
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To Show What an Indian Can Do
Sports at Native American Boarding Schools
John Bloom
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture on them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity.
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Touching Base
Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era
Steven A. Riess
University of Illinois Press, 1999
The revised and expanded edition of Touching Base examines the myths, realities, symbols, and rituals of America's national pastime. Steven Riess details the relationships among urban politics, communities, and baseball while exploring how Progressive Era sensibilities shaped debates over issues like Sunday games, ballpark construction, and promotion of the games. Focusing on Atlanta, New York, and Chicago, Riess looks at all the participants--from spectators to owners to players--in analyzing how baseball both influenced and mirrored broader society.
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Trail Running Eastern Massachusetts
Ben Kimball
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Eastern Massachusetts offers incredible trail-running opportunities, ranging from popular long-distance routes like the Bay Circuit Trail to lesser-known loops that run through the mountains and forests of the Quabbin watershed and Merrimack Valley region, and trails that pass alongside the shores of Cape Cod. All over the Bay State, there are trails suitable for runners of all levels waiting to be discovered and explored.

Avid trail runner Ben Kimball offers a selection of fifty-one of eastern Massachusetts’s most spectacular trail sites, including detailed trail descriptions, topographic maps, directions, parking information, safety tips, and much more. Both experienced and novice trail runners will find Trail Running Eastern Massachusetts to be an invaluable resource for exploring nature and getting a good workout, in the Boston area and beyond.

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Trail Running Southern Vermont
Ben Kimball
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

The wild and rural landscape of southern Vermont offers a true bounty of great trail-running opportunities, from out­-and-­back (or point­to­point) runs on popular long-distance routes, such as segments of the Long Trail or Appalachian Trail, to quiet, little-known loops hidden away in the woods. This helpful guide is just the resource needed for trip planning or for a spontaneous run in a beautiful place.

Local expert trail runner Ben Kimball offers a range of suggested route options, sometimes even several at the same site, for runners of all skill levels. He also provides important practical information, such as the full distance of the suggested route; a difficulty rating; the trail style and type; the total ascent; and directions, along with a detailed description of the trail itself. There are also scannable codes for downloading trail maps to your smartphone. The trails included vary in difficulty and terrain type, and range from low elevations in the Connecticut River Valley to as high as 4,000 feet at Killington Peak in the Green Mountains. This indispensable book is the perfect companion for adventurous runners and hikers interested in exploring southern Vermont.

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Trail Running Western Massachusetts
Ben Kimball
University Press of New England, 2015
Ben Kimball, a long-time trail runner, provides profiles of fifty-one great trail runs in western Massachusetts. Geographically, this book covers the area between the Quabbin Reservoir and upstate New York, including the Pioneer Valley and Berkshire areas as well as portions of the Taconic Highlands. Elevations range from the lowlands of the Connecticut River and Housatonic River valleys to the state’s highest point at the top of Mount Greylock. The trails profiled represent a range of locations within the region as well as a range of difficulty levels and terrain types. There are options for everyone, from the beginner to the experienced trail runner looking for new options. Each run receives a two-page treatment that includes an informative trail description and a trail map, along with a scannable QR code to download each map to your smartphone. This book will appeal to the entire running community of Massachusetts and the surrounding region, including the Pioneer Valley along the Connecticut River, communities along the Housatonic River corridor in the Berkshires, the many running clubs in the Boston area, and seasonal vacationers.
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Trails of Little Rock
Hiking, Biking, and Kayaking Trails in Little Rock
Johnnie Chamberlin
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009
Residents and visitors have an urban-outdoor haven in Little Rock: actually more than two dozen of them. They are the hiking trails, biking trails as well as the canoe and kayak-read waterways within the city and immediate area. Whether your passion is a quiet walk in the woods, a mountain-climb, fishing, bird-watching, or a quiet float, this handbook will help you find and use the trails and waterways of Little Rock.
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Training the Body for China
Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic
Susan Brownell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Competing in the 1986 National College Games of the People's Republic of China, Susan Brownell earned both a gold medal in the heptathlon and fame throughout China as "the American girl who won glory for Beijing University." Now an anthropologist, Brownell draws on her direct experience of Chinese athletics in this fascinating look at the culture of sports and the body in China.

Training the Body for China is the first book on Chinese sports based on extended fieldwork by a Westerner. Brownell introduces the notion of "body culture" to analyze Olympic sports as one element in a whole set of Chinese body practices: the "old people's disco dancing" craze, the new popularity of bodybuilding (following reluctant official acceptance of the bikini), mass calisthenics, martial arts, military discipline, and more.

Translating official and dissident materials into English for the first time and drawing on performance theory and histories of the body, Brownell uses the culture of the body as a focal point to explore the tensions between local and global organizations, the traditional and the modern, men and women. Her intimate knowledge of Chinese social and cultural life and her wide range of historic examples make Training the Body for China a unique illustration of how gender, the body, and the nation are interlinked in Chinese culture.
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Transnational Sport
Gender, Media, and Global Korea
Rachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2012
Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles, Transnational Sport tells how sports shape experiences of global Koreanness, and how those experiences are affected by national cultures. Rachael Miyung Joo focuses on superstar Korean athletes and sporting events produced for transnational media consumption. She explains how Korean athletes who achieve success on the world stage represent a powerful, globalized Korea for Koreans within the country and those in the diaspora. Celebrity Korean women athletes are highly visible in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the media, these young golfers are represented as daughters to be protected within the patriarchal Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women with commercial appeal. Meanwhile, the hard-muscled bodies of male athletes, such as Korean baseball and soccer players, symbolize Korean masculine dominance in the global capitalist arena. Turning from particular athletes to a mega-event, Joo discusses the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, a watershed moment in recent Korean history. New ideas of global Koreanness coalesced around this momentous event. Women and youth assumed newly prominent roles in Korean culture, and, Joo suggests, new models of public culture emerged as thousands of individuals were joined by a shared purpose.
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front cover of Traveling the Old Ski Tracks of New England
Traveling the Old Ski Tracks of New England
E. John B. Allen
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

For over a century New Englanders have taken to the slopes in search of ways to enjoy the coldest months, and skiing has deep roots in the region. In the late nineteenth century Scandinavian immigrants worked to educate snowbound locals on how to ski, make equipment, and prepare trails. Soon thereafter, colleges across the Northeast built world-class ski programs, massive jumps were constructed in Brattleboro and Berlin, and dozens of ski areas—big and small—cropped up from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Traveling the Old Ski Tracks of New England offers a fascinating history of downhill, cross-country, and backcountry skiing across the region and its leading personalities. Moving from popular destinations like Stowe, Cannon, Bromley, and Mount Washington to the less intimidating hills surrounding Boston, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, E. John B. Allen also recovers the forgotten stories of ski areas that have been abandoned in the face of changing tastes and a warming climate.

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Trekking Across America
An Up-Close Look at a Once-Popular Pastime
Lyell D. Jr. Henry
University of Iowa Press, 2024

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Trial By Trail
Backpacking in the Smoky Mountains
Johnny Molloy
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
 
Now updated with a new preface that examines dramatic changes in his favorite hiking and camping area, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, this classic adventure chronicle, which first appeared in 1996, launched the outdoor writing career of Johnny Molloy. The author of over sixty invaluable hiking, camping, and paddling guides to natural destinations all over the country, Molloy has turned irresistible enthusiasm for the great outdoors, evident in this book, into a profound career, dedicated to honoring and celebrating our greatest wild places—and helping others enjoy them as much as he has.

In fourteen lively personal essays, Johnny Molloy describes the adventures by which he came of age as a backpacker. Born a “flatlander” in Memphis, he first visited the Smokies while attending the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the 1980s. Initially, he treated the park as a personal playground—a place to cut loose, break rules, and act irresponsibly. After many hiking excursions, however, he gained a more profound appreciation of the mountains, becoming an avid park volunteer intent on the protection and improvement of the area. He grew, as he puts it, both as an outdoor adventurer and as a human being.

Interwoven throughout these pieces is a wealth of Smoky Mountains lore and history along with dozens of tips for novice backpackers. Molloy’s stories encompass backpacking during all four seasons as well as accounts of solo hiking, off-trail hiking, and whitewater canoeing. Whether describing the hazards of crossing a stream in winter or what to do—and not to do—when one encounters a bear or a rattlesnake, Molloy writes with an infectious enthusiasm that will delight any lover of the outdoors.
 


 
 
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Troutsmith
An Angler's Tales and Travels
Kevin Searock
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Whether standing in a quiet Wisconsin creek, by a high-country lake in Wyoming, or on the grassy margins of England's hallowed chalkstreams, Kevin Searock believes anglers are driven by a vision: "There are things on this good Earth that only the angler sees, and one of them is the breathless beauty of a trout emerging from a river." Here, in this evocative collection of fishing essays, he takes readers under the surface of this ancient sport, casting a spell of water-magic. Although trout are central to many of the stories, bluegills, bass, and other warm-water fish also grace these pages.
            Telling stories in thoughtful prose, Searock writes about fly-tying, collecting fishing literature, journaling, and traveling in a way that makes Troutsmith a rich and varied meditation on fishing and the outdoors.
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Twenty Harvard Crews
George Saltonstall Mumford
Harvard University Press

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Twin Cities Sports
Games for All Seasons
Sheldon Anderson
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
The histories in Twin Cities Sports are rooted in the class, ethnic, and regional identity of this unique upper midwestern metropolitan area. The compilation includes a wide range of important studies on the hub of interwar speedskating, the success of Gopher football in the Jim Crow era, the integration of municipal golf courses, the building of a world-renowned park system, the Minneapolis Lakers’ basketball dynasty, the Minnesota Twins’ connections to Cuba, and more.
 
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