The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024(Critical Issues in Sport and Society)

High school yearbooks provide both a vivid snapshot of student life and a reflection of what the adults in the community valued the most. For instance, athletics are often covered more than academics, and boys’ sports routinely receive more attention than girls’ sports. But how have those values changed over time? In The High School, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner reads through 120 years of El Gabilan, the yearbook from his own alma mater, Salinas High School in California, where his father taught and coached. Treating the yearbooks as a historical archive, Messner makes surprising discoveries about the school he thought he knew so well. For example, over fifty years before Title IX, the earliest yearbooks gave equal spotlights to boys’ and girls’ athletics, while the cheerleaders were all boys. Tracing American life and culture from 1903 to 2024, Messner illuminates shifts in social practices at his high school that reflect broader changes in American culture across the twentieth century. The High School spotlights how the meanings and iconography of certain activities have changed radically over the decades, even as the “sports spirit complex”—involving athletes, cheerleaders, band members, and community boosters—has remained a central part of the high school experience. By exploring evolving sports cultures, socioeconomic conditions, racial demographics, and gender norms, Messner offers a fresh perspective on a defining feature of American teenage life.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. “All prejudices have been swept away”: 1903-1925 2. Football heroes and girls with pep: 1926-1946 3. Pageants of gender: 1947-1974 4. Boom, bust, and Purple Pride: 1975-1999 5. “Who runs this world?”: 2000-2024 6. Conclusion: Paradoxes of progress Appendix: High school yearbooks as personal and cultural memory Acknowledgments References Notes Index introduction 1 Chapter 1 “All Prejudices Have Been Swept Away”: 1903–1925 23 Chapter 2 Football Heroes and Girls with “Pep”: 1926–1946 57 Chapter 3 Pageants of Gender: 1947–1974 103 Chapter 4 Boom, Bust, and Purple Pride: 1975–1999 159 Chapter 5 “Who Runs This World?”: 2000–2024 207 Conclusion: Paradoxes of Pro gress 257 appendix: high school yearbooks as personal and cultural memory 267 acknowledgments 277 notes 281 references 305 index 000

About the Author :
MICHAEL A. MESSNER is a professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of such works as Power at Play and Taking the Field. This is his twentieth book.

Review :
"[A] fascinating new book about what we can learn by looking at sports and yearbooks over the course of a century. . . . It’s really remarkable." (The Nation's Edge of Sports podcast) "The High School raises important questions about sports as drivers of gender relations in American schools." (Monterey Herald) "The High School takes us on a compelling historical journey, offering a unique blend of sociology, history, and personal memoir. Messner captures not only the evolution of one high school but also the broader cultural shifts in race, gender, class, and sexuality. A brilliant and insightful work that may have many of us digging out our own yearbooks and revisiting our own stories." - C. J. Pascoe (author of Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School) "A brilliant and unique addition to the history and sociology of gender studies and sport. It has an important place in every sport sociologist's library, but it also stimulates all of us to look back at our high school years with new eyes." - Patricia Vertinsky (coeditor of The Female Tradition in Physical Education) "The High School is a splendid study of more than a century of high school culture, sport, and gender relations at Salinas High School. In this meticulously researched study, Messner combines a sensitive reading of sources with empathy for his historical subjects to produce a lively narrative about one of the most important institutions—the high school—of adolescent life. This compelling story of changing gender and race relations in Salinas offers powerful insights for scholars of sport, historians of youth culture, and general readers (anyone who has ever attended high school!) alike." - Susan K. Cahn (author of Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport) "Messner has written a powerful, compelling analysis that effectively shows just how high schools contributed to the changing status of girls and women. The Salinas High School Yearbooks not only reflected women's loss of prestige and place from the 1920s through the postwar years but also showed that high school life played an important role in driving that change. This is a superb study of gender, power, race, and class in Salinas, California." - Carol Lynn McKibben (author of Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City)