#000634
Jiu-Jitsu
Frederick P. Lowell
An early American instructional manual in jiu-jitsu by Frederick P. Lowell, from the era when Japanese grappling was first being popularized for a Western audience as physical culture and practical self-defense. Organized as a course of holds, throws, breaks, and counters, it teaches technique through step-by-step description and posed illustrations, aimed at the ordinary reader rather than the competitive athlete. Books like this one carried jiu-jitsu into American gyms, police training, and home practice decades before Brazilian jiu-jitsu and modern mixed martial arts reshaped the field. Read now, it is as much a period document of early-twentieth-century fitness culture as a usable manual — a snapshot of how a foreign martial art was translated, simplified, and sold to a curious public. Collectors of vintage martial-arts literature and students of the art's Western history will find it a modest but genuine artifact.
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The author
Frederick P. Lowell was an American instructor and author who wrote on jiu-jitsu and judo during the first half of the twentieth century, part of the generation that adapted Japanese grappling into English-language self-defense and physical-culture manuals; he is also associated with the title America Fit With Jiu Jitsu Judo.
The book
Jiu Jitsu presents a practical course of techniques — grips, throws, locks, and escapes — described and illustrated for self-instruction. It reflects the pre-war moment when jiu-jitsu was marketed to Westerners as both exercise and effective defense, well before the sport's later transformation.
How to read it
As history more than as a training system. The nomenclature and some mechanics diverge from modern judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and no book replaces hands-on coaching; but as a record of how the art entered American life it is charming and informative.
For more context
Compare with other early manuals by writers such as H. Irving Hancock, and with histories of jiu-jitsu's arrival in the West.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Frederick P. Lowell
- Publisher
- A. S. Barnes and Company
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1942
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Colorado