Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Brian D. Bunk, "From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
Description: Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from th...