The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024

by Michael A. Messner

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.

Genres: History

340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2025

Reviews

[Alice Echols · Rating 5 out of 5]

The High School is not just a beautifully produced book, it is also a thoughtful and rigorously researched book about how gender, power and sports operated in American high schools from the start of the 20th century to our own times. Messner tells this story by examining the yearbooks of his own high school in Salinas, California. A sociologist of sports and gender, Professor Messner reveals how much sports can shape students’ experiences of high school. He pays special attention to the changing fortunes of sports for girls. Readers will learn a lot from this book, including the fact that girls’ athletic achievements were more valued in the earlier part of the 20th century than in the tumultuous 1960s when everything else seemed to change at warp speed. Messner also discovers that when change did come to girls’ sports in the 1970s, girls of color played an outsized role in the shift. An important historicizing of the American high school, Messner’s book is also a timely contribution to our understanding of the hot-button topics of sports, schooling, and gender. A great read guaranteed to take you back to your high-school years!