Mark F. Bernstein – författare

Every autumn American football fans pack large college stadiums or crowd around grassy fields to root for their favorite teams. Most are unaware that this most popular American sport was created by the teams that now make up the Ivy League. From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869, these major schools of the northeast-Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale-shaped football as we now know it. Almost every facet of the game still bears their imprint: they created the All-America team, produced the first coaches, devised the basic rules, invented many of the strategies, developed much of the equipment, and even named the positions. Both the Heisman and Outland trophies are named for Ivy League players.Crowds of 80,000 no longer attend Ivy League games as they did seventy years ago, and Ivy teams are not the powerhouses they once were, but at times they can still be a step ahead of the rest of football, as in 1973 when Brown and Penn started the first black quarterbacks to face each other in major college history.In this rich history, Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. The college fight song is an Ivy League creation (Yale's was written by Cole Porter), as are the marching bands that play them. With their long winning streaks and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. But football was almost abolished early on because of violence in Ivy games, and it took President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate disagreements about rough play in order for football to remain a college sport. Gambling and ticket scalping were as commonplace then as now, as well as payoffs and recruiting abuses, fueled by the tremendous amount of money generated by the games, revenue that was oftentimes greater than that collected by the rest of the university. But the Ivy teams confronted those abuses, and in so doing helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life. Although Ivy League football and its ancient rivalries have disappeared from big-time sports by their own accord, their legacy remains with every snap of the ball.

The Almanac of State Legislative Elections, Third Edition combines detailed, state-by-state, district-by-district election results for the nation’s 6,744 state legislative districts with a wide range of socioeconomic data for each district to present a comprehensive portrait of voting and demographic trends across the nation. This new edition features data from 2000 through 2006, covering the most recent trends and updates to district lines. It includes extensive state-by-state analyses and 290 maps of the district boundaries. Inside, researchers will find: An introductory overview of the major trends in all 50 states and their legislative districts In-depth data from each state showing the voting results and demographic changes in each of the districts from 2000 through 2006Concise and informative essays on each state that offer context to the data presented and provide valuable historical perspective and analyze current major electoral and demographic changesOver 290 color maps showing district boundaries for state House and Senate districts, plus detail maps on urban areas and population that show how much each district has gained or lost in population during the periodStatistical tables for each state, showing district-by-district population changes, along with up-to-date (2006) demographic data measuring average household income, degree of higher education, percent above/below the poverty line, and ethnic/racial mixThis unique and valuable work is the only resource to bring together district maps, elections results, and demographics for all 50 states in one source.