The High School Yearbook

In the fall of 1984, high school senior Beth Ellsworth and her yearbook staff were facing a tough task: how to tell the story of the good things that were happening at Harlan Community High School, while at the same time acknowledging the pain that they and their classmates were feeling in the wake of the agricultural crisis that was sweeping Iowa. While the obvious choice would be to focus on a big event that was happening that year, or to do a “sign of the times” yearbook, none of that was particularly appealing. After all, in small-town Iowa in 1984, “this isn’t really inspiring, this sign of the times,” as Ellsworth reflected. The staff made a decision. “The way things were going at that time were really not so great, so instead of shying away from that we opted to tell it like it was.”¹ The result was a remarkable Farm Crisis document, one that reminds us that there is a great deal to be learned about youth culture, both within and outside of the school, from the seemingly simple high school yearbook.

For historians interested in late twentieth-century youth, sources generated by young people can be hard to find. Letters and diaries have yet to make their way into collections, and other first-hand sources are scarce. Yearbooks, written by teenagers, for teenagers, would seem to be a logical choice for exploring the ins and outs of youth culture. The historians most likely to use high school yearbooks are, not surprisingly, those studying education. Brian K. Clardy examined The Devilier, the yearbook of South Fulton High School in Tennessee, to flesh out his story of desegregation at that school, showing the many ways that even in a supposedly desegregated school, African American students suffered exclusion.² Other historians using yearbooks to tackle civil rights stories include John Hale and David M. Callejo-Perez.³ Using yearbooks in a different way, we find Sara Dwyer-McNulty diving into early twentieth-century high school annuals in search of girls’ presentations of themselves, within the context of the 1920s parochial school. She found that, in spite of their “uniform” appearance, “Catholic school girls took their cues from both the youth culture and the Church to present an identity distinctly their own.”⁴ In these four cases, yearbooks allowed historians a glimpse of student life in the twentieth-century high school.

Using yearbooks to examine the history of education is a logical choice, but let’s suppose that you want to use yearbooks for a different purpose. Let’s suppose that you want to use the high school yearbook to explore an era, and not simply the way teenagers experienced that era in the classroom. I am in the middle of a project examining the social history of the Farm Crisis in Iowa. I want to know how Iowans in general experienced that decade, but especially how teenagers and young adults experienced the 1980s. They were, of course, among the first to abandon rural communities when their parents lost farms and jobs disappeared. For them, what did youth culture look like, and in what ways did the events of the decade influence how they felt about the place in which they lived? Yearbooks can help to answer these questions.

To a remarkable degree, late twentieth-century high school yearbooks chronicle student life outside the classroom. Although yearbooks dating to the 1960s or 1970s and before often provide little in the way of editorial content, those of the last decades of the twentieth century are chock full of commentary. If you want to know what teenagers did in their off hours, yearbooks will tell you. In the small towns of 1980s Iowa, teenagers devoted Friday and Saturday nights to cruising. They also seem to have spent a considerable amount of time drinking illegally, something that several yearbooks rather daringly documented. Ames High School served a university town, and its yearbook staff did not shy away from controversial topics. Ames High’s 1984 Spirit detailed the various alcohol...