Soccer Frontiers: The Global Game in the United States, 18631913 [Hardcover]

Winner of the 2022 North American Society for Sport History Book Award!

The early history of soccer in the United States has received relatively little scholarly attention. While the sport’s failure to make cultural inroads has been the source of much reflection and retrospection, other pastimes such as baseball, basketball, and American football have been covered far more extensively.Soccer Frontiershelps to fill this gap and correct the widespread notion that soccer was unfamiliar in the United States before thelate twentieth century.

Editors Chris Bolsmann and George N. Kioussis’s collection sheds light on America’s little-known soccer history by focusing on the game’s presence in major American cities between 1863 and 1913. As waves of immigrants arrived and American cities began to industrialize and become sizable cultural hubs, soccer, too, began to flourish. With essays focused on the years between the Civil War and World War I—a period which saw the creation of both the English Football Association and the US Soccer Federation—this volume also offers diverse regional representation, moving from New England to the South to the West Coast.

Soccer Frontiersseeks to identify the distinctive yet understudied traits of American soccer, thereby contributing an important missing piece to the broader puzzle of American sport history.

CHRIS BOLSMANN is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Northridge. He is coauthor, with Dilwyn Porter,English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Gameand coeditor of two books with Peter Alegi:Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, andSpace and South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid and Beyond.

GEORGE N. KIOUSSIS is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, l³Î