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News and Reviews

Ohio State University Sports and Society Initiative Webinar, The ascent of the ‘Sports Spirit Complex’ in an American high school, April 17, 2025

The Nation. Podcast - Edge of Sports with Dave Zirin, What to Learn From a Yearbook, April, 7, 2025

Monterey Herald, Local books: Tracing history through high school yearbooks, April, 6, 2025

Monterey County Weekly, A Salinas High alum investigates the shifts of society by digging through decades of yearbooks, March, 2025

Reviews of The High School

“Michael Messner has written a powerful, compelling analysis that effectively shows just how high schools contributed to the changing status of girls and women. The Salinas High School Yearbooks not only reflected women’s loss of prestige and place from the 1920s through the postwar years but also showed that high school life played an important role in driving that change. This is a superb study of gender, power, race, and class in Salinas, California.”

— Carol Lynn McKibben, author of Salinas: A history of race and resilience in an agricultural city.

“Mining his collection of well over a century’s worth of high school annual yearbooks, Michael Messner provides a magnificent analysis of sport, gender, race and ritual at Salinas High School in California. Deeply embedded in his stories are his own personal experiences as a former student of the school where his father was the basketball coach and his sisters also attended, but the range and depth of Messner’ observations stem from his exemplary academic career-long analyses of gender relations, race, class and sport which shine across the pages of this book.

In so many ways Messner illuminates how the extensive range of Salinas high school’s El Gabilan yearbooks open a unique window onto the contemporary paradoxes of girl’s progress in sport over the last century or more, in the school’s developing role in opening occupational and sporting opportunities for an increasingly diverse student body, and unsurprisingly, in the continuing centrality of football. Indeed, he attests, despite ongoing shifts between change and continuity, sport as an institution remains mostly and stubbornly sex segregated in many ways, and schools such as Salinas High School are no exception.

The High School is a brilliant and unique addition to the history and sociology of gender studies and sport. It has an important place in every sport sociologist’s library, but it also stimulates all of us to look back at our high school years with new eyes.”

— Patricia Vertinsky, author of The female tradition in physical education: Women first reconsidered

“The High School is a splendid study of more than a century of high school culture, sport, and gender relations at Salinas High School.  In this meticulously researched study, Messner combines a sensitive reading of sources with empathy for his historical subjects to produce a lively narrative about one of the most important institutions – the high school – of adolescent life. This compelling story of changing gender and race relations in Salinas offers powerful insights for scholars of sport, historians of youth culture and general readers (anyone who has ever attended high school!) alike.”

— Susan Cahn, author of Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport

The High School takes us on a compelling historical journey, offering a unique blend of sociology, history and personal memoir. Mike Messner captures not only the evolution of one high school but also the broader cultural shifts in race, gender, class, and sexuality. A brilliant and insightful work that may have many of us digging out our own yearbooks and revisiting our own stories.”

— C.J. Pascoe, author of Nice is not enough: Inequality and the limits of kindness at American High