Yearbook Collection

Yearbooks distinctly shifted to representing the student experience through photography, including formal and candid images, abstract perspectives, and documentary-style images of people, events, and environments.

Cultural awareness and civic engagement played an important role in students' school and extracurricular activities. Institutions used social studies, art, music, and literature courses to help students develop a knowledge of and appreciation for other cultures. Student organizations frequently hosted workshops, guest speaker lectures, exhibitions, and rallies to educate fellow students and local communities about social justice issues. Many yearbooks documented civil rights movements, student protests, and events surrounding the United States' war involvement.

Photographs and graphics are predominantly black and white, but color printing was growing in popularity. Some schools included multiple color photographs on the inside of the front and back cover, on the title page, in the opening section of the yearbook if it featured highlights from the year, and to emphasize social and athletic events like prom or a championship sports game.

Around the mid-and late-1970s, some high schools printed the senior's photographs in color.

Group photographs of teachers and subject departments, grade levels or classroom groups, and student organizations became standard to include more students and faculty at one time.

Yearbook pages about curriculum content, clubs, and organizations include more documentary style and candid photographs of students engaged in learning and activities and fewer or no written descriptions.

Not all pictures included captions, and some schools omitted captions entirely as a stylistic choice. Group photographs of clubs or athletic teams might provide captions on an adjacent page, identifying students by row with a first initial and last name. For pictures of students engaged in activities, such as a class lecture or choir practice, a caption might provide commentary on what was happening in the photograph rather than naming individuals.

Yearbooks documented events hosted by many social organizations, such as the Parent Teacher's Association, Mother's Club, father-daughter dances, bake sale events, and social luncheons.

Many schools used cropped snapshots for faculty and staff photographs taken during class lectures or activities instead of posed portraits.

Photograph sections about faculty and staff, particularly in high schools, often included group portraits of the clerical departments, cafeteria staff, and maintenance employees.

Yearbooks from 1951 to 1980 often include:

• Lists and photographs of "class notables" or descriptive superlatives (most humorous, most talkative, etc.)
• More and larger photographs documenting classroom work, projects, and activities and fewer written descriptions of courses and department activities
• Photographs of student athletics and social events with brief or no descriptions
• Organizational elements like a table of contents and an index of student names listing pages with their photographs
• Some schools with relatively smaller graduating class sizes reintroduced the directory, listing student phone numbers and addresses
• For high schools, student editors might design the yearbook around a theme, such as music, literature, or the military. For example, referring to the section of concluding remarks as a 'coda' or labeling students as 'cadets' instead of 'freshman'

Using one or two accent colors on section title pages remained a consistent design choice.

Information about individual students differs between schools and depends upon the year. Some universities list only a student's name, while high schools might provide more details about a graduating student's achievements, best memories, or advice to the junior class.

Some schools published yearbooks with larger page dimensions and a higher page count. Many schools used the additional space to feature more photographs per section about social events, clubs, organizations, and athletic events. The design ranged from a tight montage of clippings to full-page spreads.

Yearbooks occasionally included student-drawn illustrations and cartoons on section title pages or as margin graphics.

It became common for schools that had multiple graduation ceremonies throughout the year to publish one yearbook for all the students instead of publishing multiple books. For example, one book would include separate sections or headings for January, June, and possibly winter or summer graduates.

Schools shifted away from full-page or quarter-page features about graduates to focusing most of the yearbook content on activities, social events, and sports.

Similarly, instead of increasing the size of student photographs by grade level, many schools began standardizing the image and content layout for first-year students, sophomores, and juniors and used only slightly larger pictures for seniors.

High schools and colleges emphasized the importance of participation in social activities and community engagement. Institutions would devote multi-page sections to school events and how local and international news impacted students and shaped their learning.

Schools encouraged cultural awareness through art, music, literature, language clubs, and event days.

Advertisements and patron pages were standard in the backs of high school yearbooks, often interspersed with student-submitted jokes or more candid photography.

Universities, colleges, and high schools celebrating an important anniversary or milestone typically include more historical content in their yearbooks. They usually had information on their founding, influential administrators, new buildings and facilities, developments in curriculum, highlight events, and photographs from past decades.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many schools admitted students twice a year. Students could begin in the fall or spring semester, and the school held graduation twice a year, winter and summer. This admission schedule means that yearbooks from this time might have multiple sections of seniors, possibly two sections of graduating seniors, and the senior students still taking classes.

Some schools only published yearbooks for graduating students.

In the catalog and finding aid, a one-half fraction after the year designates a mid- or half-year publication, such as "1916 ½."

Since individual schools set admission schedules, some schools published books with February and June graduates from the same calendar year, and others published with June and February graduates from consecutive calendar years. If the school and years you are looking for include a ½ fraction, keep search years flexible and include a year before or after to account for when a student or graduate might be listed.

It was not until around the 1970s that most Chicago grade and high schools solidified a primary enrollment date in the fall and held a single graduation at the beginning of summer. However, colleges and universities still admitted students on a rolling basis.