This thesis contends that the contemporary phenomenon of youth football is the fruit of a variety of historical developments over the twentieth century. The manner in which the junior game evolved as an independent subset of the sport in France and America was certainly exemplary of the idiosyncrasies of national sporting culture, football in particular, the general timeline of each country as well as the place of 'youth' in wider society. The present study aims to expand the understanding of the game of football, specifically the youth sector, through a transnational line of enquiry covering the period from circa 1920 to circa 2000. The thesis structure is broadly thematic and chronological. This comparative approach attempts to remain coherent across both countries with a goal of outlining the core issues and major shifts which occurred over the chosen period. Youth football underwent a process of demarcation from the adult or elite game but maintained and furthered specific mechanisms linking the two across sporting, educational, and professional bridges. With the decade of the 1970s serving as a turning point, the youth level achieved a sort of independence while being inextricably fused to the top level. The essence of the growing separation of the youth from the senior level rested on the fundamental notion of 'age' as opposed to 'ability'. The organisation of football around this concept of 'age', and the resulting limitation of participation, provided a basis for 'junior' football as a distinct entity by the last quarter of the twentieth century. Subsequent divisions extended the differences between age categories and created a full competitive youth spectrum for younger and younger players. The game was, as a result, 'juvenilized'. The registration of players and the competitions for which this registration was so important reflected the relevance of 'age'. Throughout this process, though in different ways and at different speeds in the two countries studied, the youth game was drawn away from its roots in the school and as a pillar of the world of education. After the initial interwar and post-war eras, youth football moved toward the worlds of the club and association. This specialisation of the game was also evident in the rules and the equipment, all of which were progressively adapted for a more pedagogically correct, and perhaps commercially oriented, fit. While the youth game separated from the adult footballing world through age classification, distinct competitive spaces, adapted rules and equipment, that expanding gulf was continually bridged in various ways in order to maintain, develop, and create new links between these two increasingly distinct sectors of the sport. The link with the elite and the professional levels was certainly not new, but from the 1970s onwards it was solidified over time and the relationship grew closer as education moved farther away or, at the least, took a back seat to 'professional training'. By the close of the twentieth century, this ultimately placed the youth game as distinct from the adult game. Yet, somewhat contradictorily, it was closer than ever to the elite professional domain. As subject to international, professional and commercial forces, the youth game was fused to elite football. These three forces pulled youth football away from their uniquely national idioms and towards a more globalized arena. Harmonizing the experience across national boundaries, a blend of educational, sporting and professional bridges ensured and furthered the connection between the youth and the adult elite player. From the late nineteenth century's amateur world view - where football and sport were idealized as a means for development of the human being or the vehicle for the transmission of elite social values - the effects of professionalization turned football into an end in itself as a legitimate career. From child's play to a real métier. By the end of the twentieth century, the youth game stood confidently with one foot in each world.

This thesis examines the lives of Cuban refugees who entered Atlanta, Georgia between 1950 and 1980. It explores early trans-national ties between the two areas. and how Cuban refugees relied on this relationship when they left the island. It shows the process they went through from finding aid and shelter to becoming a strong active community. It explains the role religious institutions had in settling refugees and shows how the state had to work to become equipped to provide resources to a large influx of Spanish-speakers. Through this thesis one will learn of the beginnings of an important Latino community in Atlanta and how its formation prepared the city for larger immigrant groups that would arrive later.

In the 1880s, capitalism as a social and economic system integrated new geographic areas of the American continent. The construction of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad (D&IR), financed by a group of Philadelphia investors led by Charlemagne Tower and later owned by the US Steel was part of this emerging political economy based on the exploitation of human and material resources. Migrant labor was in demand as it came cheap and, generally, floated between various construction-sites on the “frontier” of capitalism. The Swedish immigrants were one part of this group of “floaters” during the late 1800s and made up a significant part of the force that constructed and worked on the D&IR between the 1880s and the 1920s. This book deals with power relations between groups based on class and ethnic differences by analyzing the relationship between the Anglo-American bourgeois establishment and the Swedish and other immigrant workers and their children on the D&IR and in the railroad town of Two Harbors, Minnesota. The Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony in Minnesota, to a large extent, dictated the conditions under which Swedish immigrants and others toiled and were allowed access to American society. I have therefore analyzed the structural subordination and gradual integration of workers and, in particular, immigrant workers, in an emerging class society. The book also deals with the political and the cultural opposition to Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony that emerged in Two Harbors and that constructed a radical public sphere during the 1910s. In this process, new group identities based on class and ethnicity emerged in the working class neighborhoods in the wake of the capitalist expansion and exploitation, and as a result of worker agency. Building on traditions of political insurgency an alliance of immigrant workers, particularly Swedes, Anglo skilled workers and parts of the local petty bourgeoisie rose to a position of political and cultural power in the local community. This coalition was held together by the language of class that became the basis of a local multi-ethnic working class identity laying claim to its own version of Americanism. The period of preparedness leading up to the Great War, the war itself, and its aftermath, produced a reaction from the Anglo American bourgeoisie which resulted in a profound change in the public sphere as a coalition between “meliorist middle class reformers”, represented primarily by the YMCA and local church leaders and the D&IR and its program of welfare capitalism launched a broad program to counter socialism locally, and to forge new social bonds that would cut across class lines and ethnic boundaries. By this process, the ethnic working class in Two Harbors was offered entry into American society by acquiring citizenship and by their inclusion in a broader civic community undifferentiated by class. But this could only be realized by the workers’ adoption of an Anglo-American national identity based on identification with corporate interests, a new local solidarity that cut across class lines and a white racial identity that diminished the significance of ethnic boundaries. By these means the Swedish immigrants, or at least a portion of them, became Americans on terms established by the D&IR and its class allies.