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Research dossier · General Reference

1879 Columbia football team

American college football team season

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ27988170 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1879 Columbia football team represented Columbia University in the 1879 college football season. The team had no head coach, and compiled a record of 0–3–2. William F. Morgan served as team captain.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1879 Columbia football team” is american college football team season. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Columbia, football and team, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1879—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Columbia, football and team is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american college football team season” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27988170. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1879.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “1879 Columbia football team”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 1879 Columbia football team primary sources, 1879 Columbia football team archive and Columbia research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1879 Columbia football team”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1879 Columbia football team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.