November 21, 2025-February 13, 2026: Stop by Wells Library E460 to check out graduate student Kath Currey’s exhibit, “Winding, Trailing Arbutus: IU Yearbooks Through Time”!
“There is an esoteric phase of college life, a species of wheels within wheels, that can obtain expression through no other medium.”
That medium? A college annual, otherwise known as a yearbook. Thus proclaimed the writers at the Daily Student newspaper in the fall of 1889 when word had gotten to them that the Indiana University senior class of 1890 was conspiring to arrange such a publication. It wouldn’t be until several years later that the university would see the first publication of the Arbutus Yearbook.
What affordances can we find in the medium of a yearbook? Perhaps “a common bond of remembrance,” writes the same author, “how can this be done better than in the varied and heterogeneous representations of the annual?” Such were the expectations of the Arbutus’ first editorial board’s audience: give us a sense of shared memory, a space in which the whole student body becomes represented, that our experience is shared and worthy of reflection. With the same gusto, the author concludes: “we say by all means, let the class of ’90 give us an annual, commensurate, from both a literary and mechanical point of view, with the growing power, influence, and dignity of the university.”
Perhaps a tall order. Nevertheless, the editorial board of the inaugural edition proclaimed confidently that their volume would be the best to date, outshining all other known copies. Primarily due to the fact that, at the time of publication, it was the first and only volume.
Shared experiences, now and then
If you work with archived student publications of nearly any form, one thing that inevitably stands out is the enduring cheekiness of university students. While organizing, inventorying and describing, student archives assistants are keen to share whatever wry wit we come across with one another. You cannot, however, share them all without winding up with an endless stream of humor, the grotesque, the historically ironic; alas, we very much must get things done. This is why, even if I can’t share every bit of humor I come across with those immediately around me, I take comfort in knowing that the joke is shared across time. I see you, the graduating class of the 1965 Allied Health department – I, too, could use some sleep.
Working in the archives, in my limited experience, frequently means handling materials that bear witness to what it means to be human1. This includes quite a spectrum of experience, and is reflected also in the yearbook. As the years pass, the yearbooks take on a more journalistic tone, seeking to represent not necessarily the previous history of the university’s campus and its grandeur nor the satirical wit of college cartoonists, but to utilize the wider availability of the camera to depict more immediately the experiences of students. This shift to student’s daily life becomes inevitably entangled with the global historical context in a way that is less apparent in earlier editions.
As political movements take more space on college campuses, yearbook staff are charged with representing this momentum even in a few pages. With the aim of self-reflexively documenting campus history as it unfolds in real time, especially following the second world war, the editorial staff are forced to reckon with college politics, and in doing so to both recognize the work that political groups do while attempting to maintain neutrality. The question of whether or not organizers were doing ‘good work’ in protesting the Vietnam War, calling a Black student sit-in which postponed the 1968 Little 500 an “attraction…for I.U.’s viewing pleasure”; such were the attempts at representing fully the diverse experiences on campus in the 1960s. ‘Neutrality’ here starts to border on sardonic, and becomes stoutly so when the writers say the 75 Black student protestors, “finally decided to get up” and allow the Little 500 to continue.
As the scope of the yearbook broadens, and as our scope of history is infinitesimally wider than it was in the 1960s, the humor of the past can sometimes fall flat. Reading the 1969 yearbook now, its tone feels mixed with a sense of journalistic and satirical distance. Through a different lens, it can be jarring to see serious concerns portrayed lightly. As far as historical testimony goes, it is no small task to represent the full spectrum of campus experience, but when it comes to adding levity to such commentary it matters who’s laughing.
Tone aside, the yearbooks document the common history of IU. In some of the photos of demonstrations in the 1960s, one can spot the familiar setting of Dunn Meadow and feel its spatial legacy. In the passion of protestor’s faces, one can see the common concern for righting the ship of our shared history. In the satirical cartoons of 1900s editions and themed portraits of student societies, one can catch a glimpse of some of the other tools at our disposal for enduring the trials that both the university and the world demands, such as coffee or humor.
Changing Times, Changing Forms
The Arbutus yearbook has been published for just over 130 years. While the tradition of its publication remains the same, very little else has. Its format, binding, even its contents and especially the general stylistic texture has come to reflect the sensibilities around and the function of the college yearbook.
While physically processing each of these volumes into a collection, it’s hard not to notice how decades cluster together. The 1980s, for example, is noteworthy for the many variations of the lowercase ‘a’ that feature on the minimalist cover.
The 1920s and 1930s volumes stand out with their annual themes, from Arthurian legend (1931) to Art Deco (1933), each became iconic to those involved in physically processing the collection.
The 1931 volume became famous for the sheer amount of copies held by the Archives prior to processing (nearly 50, by the way) and speculation as to whether its relative popularity could be ascribed to just how stunning it is. In any case, it will certainly not be forgotten by Archives staff.
In many ways, these developments in both format and aesthetics can be attributed to the broader and perhaps more amorphous cultural context, but in other ways they reflect the changing technologies involved in their production. The earliest volumes tend to be leather bound, while volumes in the 1910s favor bookcloth, and later in the century paper case binding printed directly with images came to replace decorated cloth or embossed leatherette. Of course, none of these preferences are fixed. Some volumes from the 1990s attempt to replicate the look and feel of earlier bookbinding, gesturing aesthetically to the higher dignity worthy of a university as intimated in an earlier time.
The function, form, and expectations for the yearbook are clearly mutable.
On Dust, Dirt, and Everything
“It remains completely uncertain—it must remain uncertain, that is its point—who or what rises up in this moment. It cannot be determined whether it is the manuscripts or the dead or both who come to life, and take shape and form. But we can be clearer than Michelet could be about exactly what it was that he breathed in: the dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments, the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings, the by-product of all the filthy trades that have, by circuitous routes, deposited their end-products in the archives.”
— Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust”2
Steedman’s account of dust in the archives, and the polysemous reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever, offers a particular view of a historian’s archival encounters, one that we need not all be convinced by. She writes, for example, of how a historian is nearly always reading objects without an intended audience, which raises the very question of who we mean by audience (especially those of the ‘impossible-to-be-imagined’ kind). This is not the case for our yearbooks: there is an intended audience and an unintended audience alike, regardless of whether they’re easily imagined.
What I do find at least rhetorically compelling is Steedman’s meditation on dust and its status in the archive. A historian with inclinations towards the company of Derrida and Foucault may speak of dust in ways that are both strange and familiar to the archivist. No, I am not often thinking about the innumerable dead of the past when handling dirty materials. I am thinking, rather, of how often is too often to wash my hands.
I am, also, thinking of the deterioration and degradation of these books, and how significant preservation is to keeping these materials usable. I am thinking of how things tend to fall apart, even if they’re handled well, that we can only slow the processes of things turning to dust. Okay, perhaps I am thinking too of that great stream of Everything.
“I breathed in their dust”, the epigraph reads, plucked from Jules Michelet’s Oeuvres completes. In physically processing the early volumes of the Arbutus, we can say confidently that they certainly left their traces.
While dust and dirt are not the same thing, I can certainly say that I have experience working with both. It’s not lost on me that the archival vernacular of “weeding” makes use of a metaphor the literal counterpart of which is quite familiar to all who enjoy digging in dirt, myself included. If you’ll allow me to make quite the rhetorical leap, it was throughout the process of weeding, of handling dust and digging around, that I was frequently thinking of the yearbook’s namesake plant.
“There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are working in. Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and your competence in that was established long ago.”
— Carolyn Steedman
Luckily, an archive doesn’t have to be nearly as anxiety inducing as the feverishness Steedman discusses would convey. Our collections are searchable, our archivists are knowledgeable, and there are so many entry points. We’ve gotten our hands dirty, and sorted it out the best we could, so that it’s all there and ready for you.
Yearbooks as a resource, as a stepping stone
Whether you’re interrogating what aspirations college yearbooks are driving toward, what concerns saturated student experience at a particular time, or what changes yearbooks have undergone in their format or in their preservation, all of these quests and more can bring you to the University Archives. Yearbooks are a vital resource for connecting with students of the past, whether its an alumni looking for their own picture, a relative seeking information, or researchers wanting to know more about influential IU alumni, we use yearbooks to make these connections for many folks with inquiring minds.
The Arbutus also serves as a nice stepping stone to explore other collections we have in the Archives. For more information on how they do this, come visit our coming exhibit, reach out to an Archivist, or visit our reading room.
- Riffing off of Henry Glassie’s oft-quoted definition of creative expression as “a momentary fulfillment of what it is to be human” (p. 373, The Stars of Ballymenone) ↩︎
- Steedman, C. (2001). Something she called a fever: Michelet, Derrida, and dust. The American Historical Review, 106(4), 1159-1180. ↩︎
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