1950s Yearbook Highlights: Tapping Digital Archives for Student Projects

 

Do you remember how it felt to begin another full semester of remote learning in January 2021? While my students were scattered and attending class through their laptops or phones, I was facing my first semester teaching on Zoom and Canvas. I wanted to find a way to do group projects for my undergraduate course on the American 1950s (Desperate Domesticity). And I wanted to find a way for my students to feel included in their campus culture.

Since we were all learning remotely in the pandemic, we connected to campus by exploring digitized versions of 1950s yearbooks on the University Archives website. (UF’s yearbook was called The Seminole back then.) Time traveling through these yearbooks augmented students’ understanding of the time period they were studying. We considered the rise of suburbia and the nuclear family, gender roles and gender rebellion, consumerism and corporate culture, the civil rights movement and alternative domesticities. The time period seemed strangely relevant to our own as we were spending more time cooking, cleaning, and hunkering down at home. We were living our own modes of desperate domesticity.

My students curated 1950s UF yearbooks for their Highlights, which you can now find on the University Archives projects page. (Click here)

I invite you to explore their takes on their 1950s counterparts and postwar campus culture. If you click on the 1955 yearbook, you’ll find my DIY guide to teaching with yearbooks. We discussed the 1955 issue in class, thinking about what kinds of information and insights yearbooks can offer. For example:

Where might you fit into the UF campus culture this yearbook depicts?
Are there ways you think you would not fit in?
What aspects of student life do you find missing in this yearbook? Who is missing?
What are key ways your life would change if you attended UF in the 1950s?

We invite you to time travel with us through our 1950s Yearbook Highlights project.

My students and I are grateful to our University Archivist, Sarah Coates, for virtually visiting our Zoom squares and hosting our projects on the website. I also thank her predecessor Peggy McBride for showing 1950s yearbooks and other campus artifacts to my previous classes. – MB