High school yearbooks focus on the fun students had, obscuring the pain people also experienced
- Written by Michael A Messner, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
High school students will soon take part in a more than 160-year-old tradition[1] in American education: receiving yearbooks at the end of the school year.
In an era of high-speed ephemeral images and social media, some may see high school yearbooks as outdated. But high school and college students have told me that they found it meaningful to look through their yearbooks and inscribe their classmates’ books with personal messages, poems, jokes or simply their signatures.
Many graduates will tuck away their yearbooks – some to be lost forever, but others to be revisited or rediscovered years or decades later.
As a sociologist[2], I have studied high school yearbooks[3] as time capsules and as a way to understand how youth culture, sports, gender and race relations have changed, or have not changed, over time. Despite their ubiquity, school yearbooks are a largely untapped source for scholarly inquiry[4].
But as media historian Kate Eichhorn notes[5], people may probe an old high school yearbook to learn more about a mass murderer or to scrutinize whether someone is fit for public office. Some reporters, for example, dug into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavinaugh’s 1983 high school yearbook[6] while he was going through the confirmation process in 2018. His yearbook included a reference to a female student that some boys, including a young Kavanaugh, might have dated or had a sexual relationship with.
But as Eichhorn notes, some scholars seem to dismiss yearbooks as “cringy” documents created by teenagers, or as documents focused on personal nostalgia, unworthy of examination.
An incomplete picture
Yearbooks are a limited source for accurately understanding history.
In my 2025 study of 120 years of high school yearbooks[8] from Salinas High School in California, where I graduated from in 1970, I found nary a mention of the Great Depression[9] or the Salinas Valley’s violent agricultural labor strikes[10], which Salinas High alum John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s[11].
Nor did the Salinas High School yearbooks mention the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the mass social movements that opposed them.
Some yearbooks from the 2000s showed student clubs that addressed violence, substance abuse and LGBTQ+ issues. But over the years, yearbooks have mostly skipped the pain of high school and focused instead on the pleasure.
They shine a spotlight on sports, cheering and public rituals like all-school rallies and homecoming week. Photos and text blurbs celebrate the accomplishments and humorous antics of the “popular” kids and, at times, the most academically successful students.
A nostalgic rear window
It can be reassuring to dive into nostalgic remembering. It’s common for most people to idealize the past and remember it as better than today.
A Gallup poll[12] from 1939 found that 62% of Americans agreed that people were happier and more content a generation earlier. Since then, national polls consistently show[13] that most people think fondly about the good old days, and usually think 30 or 40 years ago was a better time than the one they are living today.
We can see this penchant for nostalgia in the Salinas High yearbooks of the late 1970s and 1980s. Students in these yearbooks are seen enjoying 1950s-themed dances echoing popular television shows like “Happy Days[14]” that idealized 50s culture.
In analyzing high school yearbooks of the past, I tried to not sidestep nostalgia – probably impossible to do anyway – but to consciously deploy an idea called critical nostalgia. This means acknowledging the pleasures of looking back in time, while remaining attentive to the ways that schools too often worsen, rather than challenge, inequalities among students[15].
A double focus
Taking on a critical nostalgia lens requires a double focus – first, looking at what high school yearbooks routinely illuminate, like football rallies and cheerleaders. It also means identifying what American writer and activist Tillie Olsen once called “unnatural silences[16],” like the voices, imagery and activities of marginalized students who have been left outside the frame.
Two examples from the Salinas High School yearbooks illustrate this approach.
Someone looking at Salinas editions from the early 1900s might be surprised to see girls baseball, track and field, volleyball and basketball teams engaged in interscholastic competition.
Yearbook photos show girls wearing school sports uniforms and being treated with respect.
By the early 1930s, girls sports teams disappeared from the yearbooks, absorbed into the Girls’ Athletic Association, a recently formed organization that was based on the idea that competition and vigorous exercise was unhealthy for girls.
For nearly half a century after the creation of the Girls’ Athletic Association, photos of girls playing sports were accompanied by captions that disparaged their athletic abilities.
In the mid-1970s, when competitive girls sports teams were reinstated at Salinas, the yearbooks started to give them more equitable and respectful treatment.
This history shows an uneven picture of social change, as changes in girls sports were driven by the waxing and waning of 20th-century women’s rights movements[17].
The spring 1941 and 1942 Salinas High School yearbooks, meanwhile, showed scores of Japanese American students – about 14% of the student body at the time – fully integrated into nearly all aspects of student life.
But by the time the yearbook was distributed in the spring of 1942, the Japanese American students[19] had been sent with their families to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, where they were temporarily housed in converted horse stalls.
They were later transferred for the duration of World War II to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona.
The 1943 yearbook showed zero Japanese American students, nor did the editors of the book mention how or why their classmates had disappeared from campus.
For today’s Salinas students, reading their school’s old yearbooks against the backdrop of this history can help them to explore questions about how the legacy of racial and ethnic removal and detention is echoing[20] in their community and country today.
A starting point for understanding history
It’s not just Salinas High students who might benefit from reading their school’s past yearbooks. I have spoken with a handful of professors who are guiding their students into their university’s archive of yearbooks to explore race and gender relations in their own community.
Students discover that the size, content and organization of school yearbooks have shifted over time. But the books are a rich starting point for a group exploration of how schools create a pleasurable collective identity – for some, at least – while simultaneously shaping and celebrating students’ division and inequalities.
References
- ^ 160-year-old tradition (www.npr.org)
- ^ As a sociologist (scholar.google.com)
- ^ I have studied high school yearbooks (www.thehighschoolbook.com)
- ^ source for scholarly inquiry (www.scribd.com)
- ^ as media historian Kate Eichhorn notes (press.uchicago.edu)
- ^ 1983 high school yearbook (www.nytimes.com)
- ^ CC BY (creativecommons.org)
- ^ 120 years of high school yearbooks (www.youtube.com)
- ^ Great Depression (www.britannica.com)
- ^ agricultural labor strikes (www.ucpress.edu)
- ^ John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s (www.thenation.com)
- ^ A Gallup poll (www.aei.org)
- ^ national polls consistently show (www.aei.org)
- ^ Happy Days (www.rutgersuniversitypress.org)
- ^ inequalities among students (www.ucpress.edu)
- ^ Tillie Olsen once called “unnatural silences (feministpress.org)
- ^ 20th-century women’s rights movements (doi.org)
- ^ CC BY (creativecommons.org)
- ^ the Japanese American students (doi.org)
- ^ the legacy of racial and ethnic removal and detention is echoing (www.amazon.com)
Authors: Michael A Messner, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
