This will be our 2025 Thanksgiving episode, and nothing says Thanksgiving quite like football… At least for most people, I guess. Somehow, the gene for caring about football missed me. The last football game I saw was a Super Bowl, and cohost emerita Nikki remembered that Beyonce sang Formation that year, which means it must have been 2016. All that to say that if the new book Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth can get me interested in the early history of football, it can do it for anyone. Inventing the Boston Game follows the story of a group of upper-class Boston private school boys who called themselves the Oneida foot ball club. During the height of the Civil War in 1862, they started playing a ball game on Boston Common. Authors Mike Cronin and Kevin Tellec Marston join us this week to discuss how generations have argued about whether their Boston Game was some of the first soccer in the US or the first organized American football team. Especially after a group of teammates placed a stone monument on Boston Common 100 years ago this week, it was clear that they were deliberately inserting themselves into American sports history, but a century later it is hard to tell how much of their shared mythology was true.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/340/

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Inventing the Boston Game

Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland and a Professor of History in the Irish Studies Program at Boston College. He’s published books on everything from the history of Saint Patrick’s Day to soccer in Ireland.

Kevin Tellec Marston is a Research Fellow at the The International Centre for Sports Studies, or CIES to use the French acronym, and also a Visiting Researcher and Lecturer at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. He has written about the evolution of FIFA rules, corruption in professional sports, and many other topics at the intersection of history and athletics.

Purchase Inventing the Boston Game from bookshop.org
Save 40% through January 4, 2026 when you order directly from UMass Press and use the discount code HOLIDAY at checkout.
Attend Kevin & Mike’s book talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on November 18, 2025