Suggested Research Topics - Biographical Sketches of Individual Athletes

Biographical sketches of the careers of individual U of M athletes could be done at various levels, from 3-5 page reports to more in depth treatments of the best known "stars." Football players will generally have the most documentation available.

Media Guides and game programs will provide elementary "vital statistics." The AD scrapbooks would be the basic source of information. These include clippings from the Michigan Daily, Ann Arbor News and Detroit papers. Here the researcher should be able to track the athlete's game by game performance. For football players the game films and accompanying play rundowns are available from the mid 1930s on. The "All-Time Michigan Athletic Record Book" and recent media guides may provide additional performance statistics. For the years 1943-1980 the Les Etter / Sports Information Office press releases can supplement the scrapbooks. The personal papers of coaches, e.g. Yost, Crisler, Keen, Canham, Ocker, may be useful.

The Michiganensian may have some additional information on the student's athletic career and should give a summary of his/her non-athletic activities while on campus. This could lead to research in other collections, fraternity/sorority papers for example.

The library also has many printed works on UM athletics that should be consulted.

For a few exceptional stars much more in depth papers could be written that would look not only at their on the field accomplishments but also examine the star athlete's role as campus hero and cultural icon. Tom Harmon immediately comes to mind but Bob Chappuis, Ron Kramer, Cazzie Russell, and Anthony Carter might also merit examination from a "popular culture" perspective. What was there about Harmon and his times that made him the paramount symbol of college athletics in the late thirties and early forties. Why did Chappuis, All-American half-back and war hero, make the cover of TIME magazine? The sources for this type of paper would be much the same as those listed above but would in addition require broader reading in the history of college athletics and the popular culture literature.

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In an effort to encourage creative thinking about possible research topics for students unfamiliar with archives and their inevitable complexities, archivists and student employees of the Bentley Historical Library have authored "suggested research topics ." The purpose of these is not to define a topic but rather to stimulate thinking about a topic where the holdings of the Bentley Library are particularly strong.