Football Town under Friday Night Lights

Abstract

This chapter traces the history of two competing views about the role of high school football in American communities: the “Football Town” and the “Friday Night Lights syndrome.” “Friday Night Lights” was named after H. G. Bissinger's 1990 book Friday Night Lights, a journalistic account of football at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. “Football Town” originated from a series of portraits in popular magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. The chapter first provides a background on interscholastic football before discussing how the high school football game's place in the local community began to take on larger meanings when the national media began paying attention to it in the late 1930s.