The View from the Stadium: The University of Kansas' Memorial Stadium

Abstract

The View from the Stadium: The University of Kansas’ Memorial Stadium, is a meditation over the college football stadium movement of the post-World War I era. The study incorporates higher education history, intellectual and social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African and African American history, Indigenous Nations history, whiteness studies, geography, sports history, and political philosophy. This dissertation seeks to establish the social and political backgrounds that inform the stadium movement of the 1920s. The aim is to understand the factors that influenced how KU’s Memorial Stadium (1921) was conceptualized, completed and subsequently. It is a conceptual intervention focused on stadium space and use, and contributes to the scholarship of higher education and sport.