Guts and glory, bulls and barrel racing, spurs and scars are all part of rodeo, a sport of epic legends. Cowboys and cowgirls use brain and brawn to contend for prizes and placement, but more often than not, it is the prestige of honorable competition that spurs them on. College Rodeo covers the history of the sport on college campuses from the first organized contest in 1920 to the national championship of 2003. In the early years of the twentieth century, a growing number of kids from farms and ranches attended college, many choosing the land grant institutions that allowed them to prepare for agricultural careers back home. They brought with them a love for the skills, challenges, and competition they had known—a taste for rodeo. The first-ever college rodeo was held at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. It offered bronco busting, goat roping, saddle racing, polo, a greased pig contest, and country ballads from a quartet. The rodeo was a fund-raising effort that grew enormously popular; by its third year, the rodeo at Texas A&M drew some fifteen hundred people. The idea spread to other campuses, and nineteen years later, the first intercollegiate rodeo with eleven colleges and universities competing was held in 1939 at the ranch arena of an entrepreneur near Victorville, California. Seldom does a college sport exist for eighty years without having a book written about it, but college rodeo has. Sylvia Gann Mahoney has written the first history of the sport, tracing its growth parallel to the development of professional rodeo and the growth of the organizational structure that governs college rodeo. Mahoney draws on personal interviews as well as the archives of the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association and newspaper accounts from participating schools and their hometowns. Mahoney chronicles the events, profiles winners, and analyzes the organizational efforts that have contributed to the colorful history of college rodeo. She traces the changing role of women, noting their victories that were ignored by much of the contemporary press in the early days of the sport. College Rodeo highlights outstanding individuals through extensive interviews, giving credit to the pioneers of college rodeo. This book includes rare photographs of rodeo teams, champions, and rodeo queens, blended with the true life details of sweat and tears that make intercollegiate rodeo such a popular sport.

This work celebrates a great national pastime and tradition. Taking the reader behind the chutes, Wayne Wooden and Gavin Ehringer reveal the essential character of rodeo culture today and show why it retains such a strong hold on the American imagination.

Follows the evolution of rodeo from the range to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to the extravaganzas in modern times.

They ride horses, rope calves, buck broncos, ride and fight bulls, and even wrestle steers. They are Black cowboys, and the legacies of their pursuits intersect with those of America’s struggle for racial equality, human rights, and social justice. Keith Ryan Cartwright brings to life the stories of such pioneers as Cleo Hearn, the first Black cowboy to professionally rope in the Rodeo Cowboy Association; Myrtis Dightman, who became known as the Jackie Robinson of Rodeo after being the first Black cowboy to qualify for the National Finals Rodeo; and Tex Williams, the first Black cowboy to become a state high school rodeo champion in Texas. Black Cowboys of Rodeo is a collection of one hundred years of stories, told by these revolutionary Black pioneers themselves and set against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the civil rights movement, and eventually the integration of a racially divided country.

This is the best of the Society's papers over the past three years—from lynchings to el pato boat building; from sunbonnets to hammered dulcimers; from jokes about droughts and lawyers to tales of folk, gospel and blues music; from gravemarkers to bottle trees, and more.

"Rodeos" presents a fascinating history of this Western American institution,rom its rugged beginnings on the ranch to today's very lucrativerofessional circuits. This book captures the mystique of the cowboy and hislace in Western folklore, from the early days when groups of cowboys fromeighboring ranches met to settle arguments over who was the best aterforming ranching tasks to the multi-million dollar prizes and endorsementswarded to professionals today. Experience first-hand the energy, electricity,nd exhilaration of the rodeo through stunning colour photography andintage illustrations that tell the stories of these courageous and athleticodeo characters, and highlights of important moments throughout rodeoistory.

Both a visual feast and a reference book in the style of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, Typewriter Rodeo collects custom, typewritten poems from “rodeos” worldwide, portraits of recipients, and their personal stories. Typewriter Rodeo began in Austin, Texas, when four poets brought their typewriters to a maker fair and began offering spontaneous, custom-composed poems to an enthusiastic crowd. The event quickly blossomed and rodeos began popping up all over the world.

"What would rodeo look like if we took it as a record, not of human triumph and resilience, but of human imperfection and stubbornness?” asks animal historian Susan Nance. Against the backdrop of the larger histories of ranching, cattle, horses, and the environment in the West, this book explores how the evolution of rodeo has reflected rural western beliefs and assumptions about the natural world that have led to environmental crises and served the beef empire. By unearthing behind-the-scenes stories of rodeo animals as diverse individuals, this book lays bare contradictions within rodeo and the rural West. For almost 150 years, westerners have used rodeo to symbolically reenact their struggles with animals and the land as uniformly progressive and triumphant. Nance upends that view with accounts of individual animals that reveal how diligently rodeo people have worked to make livestock into surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence in its history. Western horses and cattle were more than just props. Rodeo reclaims their lived history through compelling stories of anonymous roping steers and calves who inspired reform of the sport, such as the famed but abused bucker Steamboat, and the many broncs and bulls, famous or not, who unknowingly built an industry. Rodeo is a dangerous sport that reveals many westerners as people proudly tolerant of risk and violence, and ready to impose these values on livestock. In Rodeo: An Animal History, Nance pushes past standard histories and the sport’s publicity to show how rodeo was shot through with stubbornness and human failing as much as fortitude and community spirit.

Inside the Classroom (and Out) examines folklore and its many roles in education. Several articles explore teaching in rural school houses in the early twentieth century, while others provide insight into more serious academic scholarship in the field of folklore itself. One chapter looks at the "early years," including works about day care centers, scout programs, children's books, and the basic definition of what we mean by "folklore." Another chapter covers high school: cheerleading, football, yearbooks, and beliefs of Hispanic students. There is a chapter dedicated to Paul Patterson and his contribution to teaching; a chapter that covers college experiences, with stories about early Aggies, ghosts on university campuses, and collegiate cowgirls; and a chapter involving scholarly works, such as ways to help improve our memories, a linguistic study of cowboy poetry, and a comprehensive look at folklore studies.

Given in honor ofEmken and Sherilyn Lynton by the Aggieland Rotary Club of Bryan-College Station.