Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation » (Reprint)

SALLY JENKINS is an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post and the author of eight books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers, most notably It’s Not About the Bike with Lance Armstrong. Her work has been featured in GQ and Sports Illustrated, and she has acted as a correspondent on CNBC as well as on NPR's All Things Considered. She lives in New York City.

Sally Jenkins, bestselling co-author of It's Not About the Bike, revives a forgotten piece of history in THE REAL ALL AMERICANS. In doing so, she has crafted a truly inspirational story about a Native American football team that is as much about football as Lance Armstrong's book was about a bike. If you’d guess that Yale or Harvard ruled the college gridiron in 1911 and 1912, you’d be wrong. The most popular team belonged to an institution called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Its story begins with Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, a fierce abolitionist who believed that Native Americans deserved a place in American society. In 1879, Pratt made a treacherous journey to the Dakota Territory to recruit Carlisle’s first students.

Years later, three students approached Pratt with the notion of forming a football team. Pratt liked the idea, and in less than twenty years the Carlisle football team was defeating their Ivy League opponents and in the process...

Library Journal

Coauthor of It's Not About the Bike, Jenkins switches sports and brings back the top football team of the early 1910s, which belonged to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Prologue: Two Fields     1
The Real Field     9
Pratt     19
Fort Marion: First Lessons     43
Carlisle     63
The Last Fight and First Games     97
Cheats and Swindles     133
Not a Parlor Game     161
Dodges and Deceptions     185
Experiments in Flight     219
Advances and Retreats     247
The Real All Americans     275
Epilogue     303
Notes     317