ABSTRACT
A jerky little train packed with students steamed out of Princeton, New Jersey, early on the morning of November 6, 1869. The students burst forth with a few college songs, and then the nation's first intercollegiate 'football' contest got underway. Even in the 1880s and 1890s, when football began to supplant rowing in popularity, intercollegiate rowing remained an important spectacle among the northeastern upper class. Chicago's players responded accordingly; they won 2212. The invention of colorful pageantry not only helped give colleges distinctive identities it also helped intercollegiate football become not just a game but a sporting spectacle as well. At North Carolina's Trinity College, which would later become Duke University, football became the focus of a dispute between the school's Methodist governors and President John Franklin Crowell, a Yale graduate who had introduced football to the school as part of his efforts to modernize the curriculum.
