A Football Nation

Try to remember a time when football wasn't the biggest sport in America. When a Thursday night game between non-contenders didn't out-rate every other program on television (non-football, of course). When people said things like, "Baseball is the national pastime" with a straight face. It wasn't that long ago, and for most of football's history, it was the norm. But as a new collection of football writing through the years from the Library of America makes clear, long before football was the biggest game in the country, it was already America's sport.