Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State's World War I Era Sports Hero

by Todd M. Mealy

This first biography of W. Glenn Killinger highlights his tenure as a nine-time varsity letterman at Penn State, where he emerged as one of the best football, basketball and baseball players in the United States. Situating Killinger in his time and place, the author explores the ways in which home-front culture during World War I--focused on heroism, masculinity and sporting culture--created the demand for sports and sports icons and drove the ascent of college athletics in the first quarter of the 20th century.

276 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2018

About the author

Todd M. Mealy is a historian and biographer of books and articles about the intersection of civil rights and education, including This Is the Rat Speaking, which tells the remarkable story of the black campus movement of the late 1960s; Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State’s World War I Era Sports Hero; Displaced: A Holocaust Memoir and the Road to a New Beginning; and the much-anticipated Shades of Brown: The Official Biography of Jane Elliott and the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise. A specialist in 19th and 20th-century antislavery and civil rights history, Mealy is worked an adjunct professor in the History Department at Dickinson College and has more than two decades of experience teaching American history and academic writing at urban and rural schools in Pennsylvania. The founder and Executive Director of the National Institute for Customizing Education, Mealy is a sought-after curriculum designer whose work includes the K-12 Nonviolence365 curriculum for The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mealy attained a Ph.D. in American Studies from Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg, where he received the institution’s Sue Samuelson Award for outstanding academic achievement. He lives with his family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.