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 authentic, and whether Boston invented football.

Mike Cronin has been the Academic Director of Boston College Ireland since 2005. He was educated at the Unversity of Kent and Oxford University where he was awarded his D.Phil. He has published widely on various aspects of Irish history and is a renowned scholar in the area of sport. While at BC, Professor Cronin has developed a series of major public history projects based around Irish topics including the 2008-12 GAA Oral History Project, and since 2013, the major online repository and real-time history project for the Irish decade of Centenaries, Century Ireland. 

Kevin Tallec Marston has been thinking, researching, teaching, and writing about sports at CIES since 2005. He is a long-time Visiting Researcher and Lecturer at the International Centre for Sports History & Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester where he completed his PhD in History. He has written on the history of youth and childhood, training and education, legacy, and diffusion, as well as biographies of leaders. He has published in journals such as Contemporary European History, and contributed to some award-winning collections.

Amy Bass is a professor of sports studies and chair of the Division of Social Science and Communication at Manhattanville University. She received a PhD with distinction in history from Stony Brook University and did her undergraduate work at Bates College. Her first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, is considered a standard-bearer for those interested in studying sports from a cultural perspective. Her follow-up, In the Game, solidified that reputation. Her third book, Those About Him Remained Silent: the Battle of W.E.B. Du Bois, received an Honorable Mention from the National Council on Public History. 

Brian D. Bunk is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose research focuses on the early history of soccer in the United States. His latest book, Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States, will be published in early 2025 by the University of Illinois Press. A previous book, From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States, came out in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Sport in History, Journal of American Ethnic History, and Radical History Review.