Timothy P Brown

A History of the Football is the first book to examine the history of the gridiron football; the evolutionary path it took from its rugby ball origins to today's distinctive prolate spheroid. Richly illustrated with period images, the book examines how and why the football changed in shape, size, colors, added stripes, and gained inflation standards, all while describing these changes in the context of the game's evolution.

Hut Hut Hike explores the history of football terminology by examining when and why more than 400 familiar words and expressions entered the game. By linking the game's evolution to changes in its language, readers learn the origins of first string, basic fundamentals, X's and O's, long snapper, and hundreds more terms used in every football conversation or broadcasts. In addition, you will learn which change in the game led to dropback and handoff becoming popular, and why the names for many defensive player positions emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Organized in easy-to-read, bite-size chunks and filled with period images and illustrations, Hut Hut Hike tells football's history one word at a time.

Set in the context of the evolving game of football and America's mobilization for WWI, Fields of Friendly Strifetells the story of the players and teams from the military training camps of WWI that played in the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowls. We follow the Camp Lewis and Mare Island teams through the 1917 season, culminating in the 1918 Rose Bowl, before the players complete their training and ship to Europe, seeing action at Belleau Wood, the Meuse-Argonne, and in Flanders. Back home, a new set of servicemen train for war while playing in the 1918 season, which is upended by the federalization of America's colleges and the Spanish Flu. By season's end, teams from the Great Lakes and Mare Island training camps battle in the 1919 Rose Bowl, completing one of the most remarkable periods in the history of American football. Fields of Friendly Strifefollows these men after the war, tracing their impact on the game of football-including the development of the NFL-as well as America's military.