High School Yearbooks: Using and Preserving The Record

Abstract

High School Yearbooks: Using and Preserving The Record Catherine D’Ignazio (bio) High school yearbooks are a treasure trove for education historians. They offer glimpses into the educational past found nowhere else. Along with the changes in people a nd programs that occurred from year to year, they document the ways in which high schools shaped student identities and the meanings students took from their high school experiences. Some historians have used high school yearbooks, student newspapers, and student magazines to explore a wide variety of topics in the history of education—most commonly student culture, school life, curricula, and the extracurricular activities.1 Such official documents as administrative reports and school board minutes may be indispensable if the objective is to understand how educational policies and school programs changed over time. If the objective is to understand how students experienced high school and what it meant for their prospects after graduation, however, then student publications, especially yearbooks, should be among the sources consulted.2 [End Page 376] In the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, many high schools maintain a collection of their own yearbooks, but methods vary from school to school. One might store such a collection in the library, another in a dean’s office. Some have a designated closet, and some, unfortunately, keep their yearbooks in an otherwise junk-filled room. Sometimes historical societies accession high school yearbooks. The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, for example, collects and preserves yearbooks from across the state.3 The Newberry Library in Chicago has a large collection, primarily from Illinois, that can be found through its online catalogue. Both the Newberry and the nearby Harold Washington Library Center have many yearbooks from several Chicago high schools, most from the half-century between 1920 and 1970.4 The Chicago Board of Education maintains an archive that accepts donated yearbooks. While the archive survived the district’s recent move, it no longer has a professional archivist. The School District of Philadelphia should consider adding high school yearbooks to the documents covered by its existing records management policy. Whether or not it houses them is a separate issue. Since the Civil War, young adults attending educational institutions have documented their school experiences. By doing so, they engage in the construction of memory. At first, students compiled scrapbooks and autograph books.5 Later, they devoted the final issue of the school’s literary magazine to the graduating class, making space among the student essays, poems, and plays for remembering the seniors. This issue often included a class history written by a graduating student as well as essays and predictions, both serious and humorous, about what might lie ahead for the graduates. With the increased availability of letterpresses and half-tone printing after 1900, literary magazines evolved into yearbooks and became the primary place for memorializing many aspects of high school life, especially the achievements of those about to graduate.6 Soon after they first appeared, yearbooks and magazines were shared among schools so that they could be compared. In 1914, students in Woodbury, New Jersey, reviewed yearbooks from fourteen other high [End Page 377] schools and commented on six (fig. 1). These exchanges demonstrate a national interest among teenagers in their peers and a nascent youth culture. The editors of these student publications believed, as Reed Ueda has pointed out, that “they were not only expressing their identity, but also discovering the common bonds joining turn-of-the-century high school students in every part of the country.”7 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Yearbook exchange review, Woodbury High School White and Gold, 1914, Woodbury Junior and Senior High School library, Woodbury, NJ. Of special value are student commentaries. In Camden, New Jersey, students in 1908 asked, “Shall We Study Latin and Greek—What, then, is the value of Latin and Greek to the boys and girls of the Camden High School?”8 Decades later, changes in athletic programming prompted female students at Frankford High School in Philadelphia to correct a common misperception: “Some people have the false impression that girls do not take much part in the sports world; however according to the showing [End Page 378...