Week 02- maple

In most cases, history is written by winners. The truth is pieced together by the people who had the most involvement or triumph, but not in the case of American soccer, which was really “created” by the people with connections. In the source The Origins of Football in the United States Foundation Myths, Memorialization, and Rethinking the Oneida Football (Soccer) Club written by Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin, we are shown how one of the biggest origin stories of soccer was actually just people trying to shape how they are remembered. 

The club was started in 1862 by a group of school boys, but while they were an actual team, the authors argue that the boys status as the founders is only because of their success in making it seem like they were, even when they weren’t. The Oneida boys didn’t just play and move on, they were busy telling everyone about how they were the founders. Sixty years after they stopped playing, some of the members that still were alive got together and put up a huge granite monument on the Boston Common. They did this in order to turn their idea of a school yard game into a memorial. By building a statue to memorialize their accomplishments, people assumed that they were important. 

Cronin and Marston also dove into research from others, such as Melvin Smith and Tony Collins, while diving into the history of American soccer. They showed how Smith found proof that soccer games happened way before 1862, which shows how the Oneida boys were not the first. Collins explains how football was a transitional process, and meant that it was developing all over the world at the same time, not just all of a sudden in Boston. 

The authors describe this history as “palimpsest”, and that the history was written, erased, then written again by new people. The Oneida boys erased other names and wrote theres on the history of soccer so big that people didn’t seem to notice how the history of soccer was bigger than just a group of boys in America. The Oneida boys had more of an elite status so they had the social status and money to do things like put the monument up. 

In conclusion, this chapter shows how the past can be controlled by people with power and money. These people make sure that they are the ones in the history books, not the actual founders.