Kurt Edward Kemper's College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era is a masterful reading of U.S. culture through the lens of American football, employing exemplary research in archival sources, primary documents, and a wealth of periodicals from the era. Kemper acknowledges an intellectual debt to Michael Oriard's influential book, Reading Football, which deconstructed the game as a cultural text. Kemper, however, concentrates on a particular era and posits a distinct Cold War culture replete with its own stresses and anxieties, offering football as an outlet for such tensions and the competing perceptions of the country's value system that encompassed capitalism, democracy, religious liberty, community, individualism, masculinity, exceptionalism, and race relations.
The Kraus-Weber physical fitness tests of the 1950s indicated that young people in the United States were grossly deficient in comparison to their European counterparts. That revelation, accompanied by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1...