Inventing the Boston Game: History, Memory, and the Power of Artifacts

Описание: This four-person panel will discuss the subject of Mike Cronin (Boston College) and Kevin Tallec Marston's (CIES) new book, Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth (University of Massachusetts Press).

On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, sixteen boys played what was then called the "Boston game" - an early version of football in the United States. The Boys were largely the sons of upper-class Boston Brahmins, and they lived through the transformative periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Later as they grew old, in the 1920s, a handful of them orchestrated a series of commemorative events about their boyhood game. Benefitting from elite networks developed through the city's social and educational institutions, including Harvard University, they donated artifacts (such as an oddly shaped, battered black ball) to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected bronze and stone memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football (and later, by extension, soccer). But was this origin story of what, by then, had become one of America's favorite games as straightforward as they made it seem or a myth-making hoax? Join us for a discussion about the nature of history, questions about memory and authenticity, and whether Boston invented football.