Historians, get out your high school yearbooks! Though ubiquitous and seemingly uniform, yearbooks are valuable sources for interrogating historical methodologies, historical “objectivity,” and memory. As two former yearbook editors (at Fairfield High School in Fairfield, Connecticut) turned historians, we’ve recently reconnected and revisited our role in creating our high school yearbooks in the early aughts. These experiences, we found upon reflection, have deep relevance to our work today as researchers, educators, and public historians.
We started thinking about the agency of high school student yearbook staff (including ourselves) in assembling a product that is, by definition, historical. Yearbooks are standardized products, published by and created with templates sold by companies like Jostens, Herff Jones, and Balfour; but at the same time they are highly personalized by the students who create them, and then further personalized by the schoolmates who annotate them. For us, as editors, that tension was perhaps even more pronounced, as we took responsibility for how our classes would look back on their high school years. But did/do student yearbook staffers see themselves as creating a historical product?
Yearbooks are primary sources and also something other than primary sources. As Amy Lueck writes, a yearbook is a “shared repository of memories for reference.”1 As yearbook editors, we were responsible for curating that shared repository for our classmates. What we created was meant to be a collective history of a year, in which everyone at our school could see themselves. Indeed, one of the first things students do when they get their hands on their yearbooks is flip to the index to see where their names or photos have been featured. Yearbooks are as much a shared reference for a particular community as they are about individuals being able to see themselves as part of that community.
Yearbooks are an ideal text to start a conversation about the role of historical objectivity and memory. Is a “shared repository of memories” really possible, when memory itself is so deeply personal? Considering a yearbook as a reference text, as Lueck does, is even more compelling. If a yearbook is a reference, it has the ability to shape (or even revise) certain memories, to prompt us to consider other vantage points on our shared experiences, or to confirm our understanding of particular moments in time. As a shared repository, the yearbook can bring together a coherent narrative of a class of students, their school, and their broader community. Thus, those of us who worked hard to create those references actually had a hand in shaping our classmates’ memories. Student yearbook staff are, in a sense, historians.
We are both former yearbook staffers who became professional historians. The yearbook at our high school, Fairfieldiana, was created in a cramped, small utility closet office. A core group of roughly ten students were responsible for assembling the yearbook itself — determining a theme, deciding on layouts, taking photographs, writing captions and copy, administering polls and surveys (to gauge the interests of the student body in popular culture, community life, and of course, themselves), editing and soliciting advertisements, and putting together the minutiae of what made our yearbook “the yearbook” that students expected at the end of the school year. We worked after school hours and during lunch. As a tight-knit group who put in hours of labor to create a “shared repository of memories” for the students at our high school, we didn’t necessarily consider ourselves historians in our day-to-day work.
However, our yearbook became a primary source. As Catherine D’Ignazio writes, yearbooks are useful sources for historians who want to understand “how students experienced high school and what it meant for their prospects after graduation.”2 But yearbooks are also created using primary sources, with a mission larger than just capturing moments in time or providing a vehicle for students’ voices and concerns about their high school experiences. Rather, yearbooks function as a way of shaping future memories, as a way for students to present a vision of themselves that they will look back on in the future. Yearbooks are texts that are both historical and representative of how students imagine their future selves.
Looking back, there’s modest evidence that we grasped the place of the volumes we worked on within the larger collection of Farfieldiana yearbooks. The archive of past books was one of the most-consuming components in the utility closet that served as yearbook headquarters. The yearbooks of the past served as a reference for those of us creating the current yearbook. They provided templates of what the student body would expect from each year’s book. Moreover, many volumes also contain explicit nods to broader historical reflection, corresponding to the theme of the year. The 2002 volume (“Change is Upon Us”) featured senior class photos and bios from faculty who had graduated from Fairfield High; the 2003 volume (“A Blockbuster Year”) highlighted celebrities who attended FHS and spots from around town that are “famous.” The latter involved physically cutting out musician John Mayer’s and professional tennis player James Blake’s photos from the 1995 and 1997 yearbooks, respectively — which in retrospect was a terrible disregard for those volumes’ preservation.
One of the most important aspects of yearbooks is the signatures and messages students collect from friends and classmates. Indeed, looking back on our yearbooks now, nearly twenty years after they were produced, it is the annotations that elicit more reflection than anything else. Education scholars Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia assert that annotation “cannot be read as an apolitical and objective practice,” as annotators are able to “continuously (re)inscribe preference and power across texts and contexts.”3
By annotating, students can confirm or push back against the ways they are presented. We invite friends to sign their names and inscribe messages inside our yearbooks. In turn, we inscribe pieces of ourselves — our shared memories, our well-wishes — into the physical books of our classmates. These messages, added after publication and different in each individual’s book, become as important a piece of the final product as the photos, superlatives, or advertisements, making the yearbook a bound volume of short correspondence. Annotations shape how we are remembered by our classmates and how we remember our past selves.4
Graduating seniors were afforded the most space in our yearbook, Fairfieldiana. In addition to superlatives (everything from “Best Hair” to “Typical Senior” to “Most Likely to Be Looking in the Mirror”), seniors also received larger (color) photos and individual “bios,” short paragraphs in which they could share messages, quotes, addresses, and birthdates. These biographies —or rather autobiographies —were both formulaic and unique. Many seniors listed friends by name or included inside-jokes. Most thanked their parents and siblings. Reading the bios now, we find cliches about memory and the passage of time but also heartbreakingly honest assessments of difficult adolescent years. Many messages are positive: “The past 4 years have been great and a time that I will always remember”; “FKWTR [Friends Know Who They Are], thanks for a lifetime of memories”; “The past four years have flown by. I couldn’t have made it without all the good times with friends.” Some are negative, or more tongue-in-cheek: “High school was fun. Now its time to leave”; “I want to thank every1 that said I wouldn’t make it you gave me the desire to work harder”; “I made it to graduation! Thanku God!” A personal favorite: “And somehow my lackadaisical work ethic paid off.”
Through these customary vehicles we can see relationships defined and sincere expressions of frustration and reflection, capturing not only a snapshot in time but also a history of real emotion: “No regrets. We had some tough times, I love you”; “School takes way too much time and I’m glad this part is over. Now I can focus on things I really want to learn.” The yearbook is delivered to students at a crucial time, the end of the year. Therefore, the bios provide an opportunity for students to have their “last word,” whether it is directed at friends, former and current romantic partners, parents, teachers, or the general high-school community experience: “M&D [Mom and Dad] I’m trying. Have some faith God has a funny way of working things out.”
The bios also reflect graduating students’ awareness of the yearbook as an enduring historical artifact, something that holds weight and expectation for how their future selves will be perceived by others. Some students wrote directly to an imagined future readership: “Hi person reading this! I can’t believe I’ve survived 4 years of FHS!” Others acknowledged the anticipated gravity of the genre and format: “These senior write-ups are supposed to be something meaningful, well, I’ve been sitting here for I dunno how long, and I still can’t think of anything to say, so I guess I’d just like to thank my parents and friends, you know who you are, give yourselves a big pat on the back, thank you.”5
Even more so than the biographies, the “advertisement” space allowed for personal expression — for those seniors who could afford to purchase a block. Inside-jokes and photo collages allowed groups to friends to publish a curated selection of photographs in a time before Instagram, though they were censored by staff who were instructed to remove any references to or depictions of illegal substances or alcohol, including red party cups, which were crudely obscured with a black permanent marker. Student yearbook staff, who created the text that would ultimately be approved, printed, and sold, held a degree of power over their fellow students, blocking out forms of self-expression that were illegal or unapproved by school administrators and parents.
As yearbook editors, many of our decisions were dictated by the genre and its standard features, but a great deal was left to our creative and editorial discretion, particularly with regard to the selection of images. Our goal was to be inclusive — every club, every athletic team—but surely our own biases, friend groups, and sensibilities prioritized what content we published and what we discarded. Similarly, in writing history, we know we can’t willfully misrepresent or cherry-pick evidence or ignore counterevidence, but we do have a degree of control over what sources and what voices we choose to amplify or interrogate. A yearbook cannot be viewed as an objective and neutral text distributed to student consumers who personalize it only after production. Rather, in shaping the “shared repository,” student yearbook staff make choices that have an impact on the student body’s collective memory.
A curious aspect of our time as yearbook staff was our friendly and exaggerated rivalry with the staff of the Focus, the high school newspaper. Twenty years later, what is the historical value of the sources we produced? The school newspaper engaged in investigative reporting and afforded more space for student voices. But several factors point clearly in the yearbook’s favor: it’s a more efficient compendium, with higher quality paper and color images, and it captures a wider array of the student body and school personnel. The town public library maintains no archive of the Focus, but does of Fairfieldiana. Though the Focus arguably presented a truer documentation of the school year, its readership was ephemeral; most issues were read and discarded the week they were published. However, to be fair, one of the authors of this article definitely did save a few issues of the Focus for posterity, including the issue where the newspaper staff sketched out a fictitious snowball “battle” between the newspaper and the yearbook. In the article, the newspaper concedes their status as the more ephemeral high-school text: “It is true that the Yearbook maintains a budget several billion times larger than that of the Focus; roughly 3.8 billion, according to recent figures released by the Congressional Budget Office…. While the Yearbook may be the United States of school publications, the Focus is Canada.” Maybe the lesson here is that we have always been as nerdy as we are today.
It’s unclear what the future of yearbooks will be. Recognizing that some minimalists might have ditched their physical yearbooks long ago (Fairfieldiana was incredibly large and heavy), sites like classmates.com are trying to make a business of digitized versions. But they still retain much of their nostalgic pull. Why, we might ask? Psychologists posit that collective nostalgia offers a sense of group identity, which yearbooks no doubt can encourage.6 But do yearbooks stoke a longing for glory days and the way things used to be? Or do they induce reflections on an awkward period of life? Here the differences between high-school and college yearbooks might be salient, since in some communities high school retains its association with youth and promise, while in other communities the college yearbook might be more strongly associated with a collective identity and positive memories. While some may delight at the digitization provided by classmates.com, others might be horrified to find their high school yearbooks no longer collecting dust on a few hundred shelves but instead easily accessible on the internet.
For so many of us, high school was hard. Even if our senior bios and advertisements emphasized friendships and positive experiences, adolescence shapes us profoundly — it is something we make it through. We may fear that turning the pages of an old yearbook will conjure memories of feeling out of place, or present us with a vision we once had for the future which hasn’t been realized. But what else is in there? With distance and time, it’s possible to look back on the people we knew in high school (and those we did not know) with much more kindness, to see how they expressed their agency in a circumscribed format. Additionally, we can assess how student yearbook staffers crafted the history of that school year, situating their place in a local community history. And, through annotations and reflective messages, we can see how people saw us and how we saw ourselves — both of which may be different from what we remember.
The Fairfieldiana staff of 2003. The co-authors are in the front row: Kristina on the far left, Mary beside her (pretending to stab a co-editor with a pencil).
- Amy J. Lueck, “‘Classbook Sense’: Genre and Girls’ School Yearbooks in the Early-Twentieth-Century American High School,” College English 79 (March 2017): 381.
- Catherine D’Ignazio, “High School Yearbooks: Using and Preserving the Record,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 141 (Oct. 2017): 376.
- Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia, Annotation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 132.
- For more on yearbook annotations, see John R. Thelin, “Thanks for the Memories,” Inside Higher Ed, Oct. 24, 2018.
- Fairfieldiana 15 (2002); Fairfieldiana 16 (2003).
- T. Wildschut, M. Bruder, S. Robertson, W. A. P. van Tilburg, and C. Sedikides, “Collective nostalgia: A group-level emotion that confers unique benefits on the group,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107.5 (2014): 844–63.
