-...are recorded.
This will be available to everybody who signed up,
and I will be sending this recording out via e-mail
no later than tomorrow morning,
so you can watch this with additional classes
or even if you have to leave early, something like that.
You'll have this available and ready to use,
and this will just be right on YouTube.
All right. So what you'll see now, actually,
is that our room is going to transition a little bit.
So give it a second to load up here
and just to give you the lay of the land
before we come on-camera,
below, where it says, "Camera," in that gray box,
you'll see an area that says "Q and A pod."
We would love your questions about this yearbook collection,
and throughout the program, you can type them in there.
Once we're kind of done with our major presentation,
we're going to have a nice Q and A session,
and we'll answer those questions coming through,
so please put them in there any time.
Now, I guess, without further ado,
I'm going to turn on the camera here,
so you can see Collin and I.
Hello, everybody. -Hi, guys.
-We're really excited to be
closing out our webinar schedule this year
with this program about a collection
that is definitely close to our hearts,
especially Collin's, here at the museum.
We've been collecting yearbooks for how many years?
-We've been using yearbooks for educational programming
for a long time,
but we first had the idea to digitize these yearbooks
and put them online about 3 or 4 years ago,
and the website where a lot of these yearbooks are drawn from,
I think, turned 3 this year.
-Ooh. -So 3 years old,
it's a nice toddler of a website, but no.
They're really, really fascinating,
and we're really excited to share them with you.
-So that's what you'll be seeing throughout the program today
is kind of our selection of yearbooks,
especially as we look towards, you know,
what the end of the year looks like for these students,
so literally what you guys are going through right now.
Maybe you have a couple days left of school,
a few more weeks left of school and anything in between.
We're going to be looking at that exact same time frame
for students but in 1940.
But actually, before we get up to all of that,
I thought, well, to put us all on a level playing field here
because we're going to see a lot of
probably a little slightly embarrassing images
from the 1940s,
we actually thought that we would show you
our embarrassing high school senior photos.
So there's Collin and I way back in the late '90s and 2000s...
-Sure. -...in our senior year.
-And we'll talk about, you know,
what conclusions and assumptions
you can draw from yearbook photos and images,
and I'm sure you can draw several things from my attire
in the late '90s,
but we'll leave the deep interpretation
to the historical images
and hopefully leave our feelings intact.
-Right. And who hasn't done this pose before?
I don't know. -That was...looks great.
The hair behind the ear, for me, that's...
-Yeah. So anyway... -...no good.
-There's our kind of embarrassing confession
or what have you to you all,
and we just want you to think, in the back of your heads,
as we're analyzing these yearbooks that are 70 years old,
there will be people
probably doing the same things with your yearbooks.
-With yours. -So we're going to ask you
at the end of the program
what you think people will be looking at from 2017.
All right.
So, of course, you know, modern day, now,
even you saw our late-'90s,
you know, 2000s yearbook photos,
and now we're all the way, of course, in 2017.
But we are really taking a trip down memory lane
and really going back into the 1940s
and, as I said, going on a cross-country exploration.
We're going to show you where exactly, but before we do that,
I thought, actually, we could kind of all start off
on kind of level playing field here
so we all know what we're talking about.
And so when we analyze yearbooks,
and some of these photos that you see here on-screen,
we'll be looking at a little bit more in-depth.
We just want to understand what kind of sources
we are actually looking at,
and I know you've all probably learned about this before,
but again, let's just kind of get it all out here.
So first off, you all know there's two kinds of sources
that we spend a lot of time analyzing in history,
primary sources and secondary sources.
So primary sources, they are original items or records
that have survived from the past
and were a direct experience from a time or event.
We deal with these a lot here at the museum.
They are at the heart of our collection
whether it's artifacts,
and we've got big artifacts like the C-47 and the Sherman tank,
there, of course, lots of propaganda here at the museum,
hundreds of posters in our collection,
thousands of photographs,
and, actually, some of those are online,
and we're happy to share those resources
with you at the end, too.
We have a collection of thousands of oral histories.
Many of them are also digitized,
so that's the firsthand testimony for veterans or people
who witnessed or experienced events in World War II,
and then also,
we love all that kind of personal material here,
so journals, letters, archival material,
things like that, and these are some things
that you'll also probably use in your history papers
when you're doing research,
but we won't also discount the other major source,
which is secondary sources.
Now, they're also important to us, too.
They are accounts of the past created by people
without firsthand experience
sometime after they happened,
and so you probably think of your textbooks
and things like that.
Even sometimes what, you know, we create,
and what we share about the war,
you know, comes from our voices here,
and I know we showed you our yearbook photos.
We're not that old, so anyway, so, yeah.
Those are the two differences,
and when we talk specifically about yearbooks in this sense,
yearbooks are going to be an important primary source for us
because, especially when we look
at how the war affected people your age,
and they create...
They have lots of interesting little bits
and pieces of information
inside of them that help us piece together
what was going on at that school,
in that town or community and then, of course,
across the country.
So I thought, actually, to start off today,
give you guys a poll question.
And you can -- This is actually one of those poll questions
where you type in your answer.
You don't select one, and we just want to know from you,
what kinds of information do you think you can learn from life
during the war from a yearbook?
-So, yeah, the idea of what you think you might see
or what type of things
you might find in these yearbooks
that were put together like yearbooks
are today by teachers
and probably, like, a yearbook or an annual club or class
and what type of events
they thought would be important to chronicle
to show the life in the year --
a year in the life of a student during World War II.
-Yeah, especially if any of you are on, like,
the yearbook team at your school,
you can even think about, like, what did I use as,
like, a yearbook editor to put this all together.
Like, what was important? All right.
And we'll let you, again, since you have to type it in,
we're making it a little bit more challenging for you guys.
-Sure. -We'll give you a few more
seconds here to answer,
but you even saw a glimpse of what this looked like.
You know, we saw a few early yearbook pictures
as you guys were waiting in that lobby.
So let's just look at some of these results now.
Feel free to type some more in.
I like the way that, you know, society was,
and I think that's probably how people will look
at our yearbooks
from whatever year, you know, you analyze.
-Sure. -And important aspects of life,
which sports are the most popular.
Maybe we'll get into that a little bit, too,
and then we do enjoy looking at clothing styles and hairstyles
are pretty awesome from the 1940s as well.
-And it's definitely something to think about, too,
when looking at these pre-1950s artifacts.
The idea of a teenager really didn't exist,
of a young person with a disposable income.
So a lot of the fashions we'll see, we'll see of students
sort of wearing cut-down versions
of what their parents would wear,
so these students may look a lot older,
but they are students, 17, 18 years old.
They just may look a lot older because there weren't
dedicated fashions for young people back then.
-The other thing I like that someone put in here,
their social lives.
You'll see that these yearbooks, and we'll look at some,
are filled with signatures,
and so you could see relationships between people.
I don't know.
I can't remember if we included these one...
-I'm not sure, either. -...but I'm thinking
about that one lady who she, like,
circled everyone she dated
and all of her best friends in her yearbook.
And so that's another really great example.
All right.
You guys have some really great ideas.
Let's actually move on and show you where we're actually
going today,
and so you can see we're hitting
almost every region of the United States
and going even as far as Hawaii, so these are the yearbooks
in different regions that we'll be...
Collin will be kind of guiding you through today.
-Mm-hmm. -So do you want to start...
-Sure. -...and let's start
with our...
Let's start with a practice, actually, for you guys.
-Right. -So you want to explain what
they're seeing on-screen?
-Sure. Thanks, Chrissy. Absolutely.
So what you guys are seeing on the screen now
is a page from one of the yearbooks
that we have featured on our yearbook collection,
our digital learning project, See You Next Year!
High School Yearbooks from World War II,
and this is from the Prescott High School or "Hassayamper."
I believe I'm pronouncing that right, from 1944,
in Prescott, Arizona.
So this is a page directly from this primary source,
and what we do a lot at the museum here
when looking at primary and secondary sources
and that we do with teachers and students who interact with us
is we talk a lot about reading artifacts.
So we're going to read this artifact, and with this one,
it can be in the literal sense.
We'll look at what we can see with our eye
and what we can read as well,
so the two images we see at the top of this page
from the yearbook are...
They are two flags,
and they're flags with stars and numbers on them,
and these are what are called gold star flags.
And obviously we can associate gold stars
with lots of things both in-school and out-of-school,
and so one of the things that we want to address
is items and terms from the 1940s in America
sometimes have vastly different meanings
than what we have today.
So as sort of a follow-up question
to what Chrissy introduced,
that poll question of what we might see here
in these yearbooks,
I'm going to ask, seeing this in a yearbook from World War II,
a gold star flag,
what do we think the gold star on this flag might mean?
What do you think it might mean, again,
focusing on this is a wartime artifact
and that this is a school
that is chronicling their students' experience
living through World War II.
What do we think a gold star flag might mean?
-And you can see the poll question
right below us here on the camera.
So, again, another type-in one.
We're not making this easy for you guys today, so...
-This is going to be your exit exam,
your final exam as you finish up
the school year. -Yeah.
Use some extra brain cells in your last maybe,
you know, couple weeks of school here.
All right.
So we'll give you a little bit of time
to read what this says and see what you think.
All right.
We're getting some interesting...Oh, okay.
We're getting some interesting results here.
We will wait for a few more to trickle in, but let's see.
Hmm, hmm, hmm.
All right. I'm thinking...
Oh, we've got a lot of different ones.
I kind of like it.
I'm going to broadcast what we have.
Again, add what you want after we broadcast.
-Sure.
-And you can see some different interpretations,
and it shows you how a term, gold star,
can mean a lot of different things.
When we say, like, a gold-star school,
that means, like, to me, that would mean, like,
"Oh, a school that has high achievement."
You get a gold star for doing a good job.
-Yeah. -What does it mean here, Collin?
-So in the terms of World War II,
these flags here that we see, they're small.
They're not things that you would hang around a flagpole
in front of your school or your business or your home.
These were more personal banners that would be hung
in the windows
or shop fronts of folks
who had loved ones or relatives serving in World War II,
and these are called service flags,
and there were two different types,
and I think some of our groups have answered,
are hitting right on their meaning
or very, very close to it, at least.
The service flags came in two different colors.
For every relative, son, or brother, or father or uncle
you had serving in the Armed Forces,
you would have a blue star on a white field of a flag.
This is a special type of flag being displayed here
by the students of Prescott High who talk about...
In the second paragraph, it says,
"The nine gold stars represent former students of our school
and people who, yes, they died, but they didn't die in vain."
So gold stars on service flags would be changed to...
Or, blue stars would be changed to gold, rather,
if a relative or a loved one, or, in this case,
a former classmate had entered the Armed Forces
and had passed away in service either in combat
or in training or other means.
So a gold star, we think of it
as something very, very positive in today's age.
-Mm-hmm. -Back then, it was a way
for students to express their grief
or to display that they had members of their school,
faculty or student body, who were no longer with them,
so something that today means something completely different
than what it did 70 years ago,
and you guys did great with that,
got right to the heart of what you thought it might mean,
and we'll be doing more of that as we go through.
-So, yeah. That's what this is all about.
You could literally...I know we have an hour with each other,
so we're not going to do this, but you could literally flip
through every page of these kinds of yearbooks
and do an analysis just as in-depth as we did.
This is one page of the Prescott High School yearbook,
and so we're going to actually start off
with kind of that similar theme
of talking about the realities of war,
losing friends,
losing, you know, former students,
and a really great yearbook to showcase
this one is McKinley High all the way in Honolulu, Hawaii.
-So for those of you who know your World War II history
and the narrative of World War II,
America's involvement in the war
started right here in the territory of Hawaii.
It wasn't even a state then.
It was just a territory,
and this is where the Imperial Japanese Navy
attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7th,
and this is a yearbook from 1944
right in where the war began for the United States.
So in looking through these yearbooks,
you often see a lot of similar things,
very patriotic or martial imagery.
Here we see a mobilized Lady Liberty,
Statue of Liberty with a huge American flag
and what looks like maybe even a tank or something below it,
and then on the opposite facing, students reading their yearbook,
and the dedications saying,
"Our world is going through turmoil,
change, and we have hope, a transition to be followed
by an age of real progress and enlightenment."
So young people, even in this dark and chaotic time,
expressing that they had hope for the future
and the war they were going through
would ultimately lead to a more peaceful age.
-But then there's also the realities of war, you know,
that they touch on quite a bit,
specifically in this yearbook, too.
-So talking about those gold star flags
or gold star students,
this is another page from McKinley yearbook,
and this is showing off the faces,
names and short biographies of former students at McKinley
who have passed away in service,
and if you notice from their last names,
the majority of students at McKinley were Japanese-American,
which we'll get into the treatment
of our Japanese-American students
and families on the mainland U.S. a bit later,
but people who may have been viewed with skepticism
or even fear that they might be disloyal
and more loyal to an ancestral homeland in Japan,
but students of Japanese-American descent
who volunteered to fight,
and these are students from McKinley
who have passed away in service in 1944.
We often have yearbooks today broken down
in sort of a student life calendar
of what was happening in the fall to the spring
when yearbooks traditionally come out.
This shows directly how students
were getting involved with the war effort.
Even though students were serving,
there were many more who were still back here at home,
and the bottom picture in the bottom corner
actually speaks to a direct action by these students.
During World War II, the purchasing of war bonds,
war bond sales or war stamps
was encouraged as a way to help the United States
raise money for its war effort,
the idea being at the end of the war,
the United States would pay back your loan with interest,
so it was a patriotic way of you helping out the war effort,
even if you could only spend a few cents here and there,
and this is an ambitious campaign
where these students at McKinley
actually raised enough war bond funds
to purchase a bomber.
They purchased, actually, a B-24...
-Yeah, B-24 Madame Pele.
-...a B-24 Madame Pele bomber emblazoned
with some Hawaiian nose art for the war effort,
which there's a lot in these yearbooks
where students purchase Jeeps or tanks or planes
or raising funds for Red Cross,
the idea that even though there were students who were fighting,
the students who were still at home
were doing their best to support the war effort,
and we see this a lot in these yearbooks as well.
-If you think, these students aren't...
You know, you might have a part-time job,
but you're in school most of the day,
so using any of that extra income from where they got it,
like, whether it's something in a younger sense
like an allowance all the way
to maybe something from your summer job
or your part-time job going towards something like this,
like buying a bomber.
-And it's...well, today we have a --
It's a strictly volunteer army.
This was an army that was being raised of both volunteers
and people who were being drafted or conscripted,
and it was an army that, you know,
eventually reached the size of 16 million people,
so almost everyone had a friend, a relative,
a loved one who was serving somewhere,
so the idea of helping out the war effort,
it wasn't this abstract idea.
It was very personal.
You were supporting your classmate, or your brother,
or your next-door neighbor, or your boss,
or your uncle or father,
so students were very, very much encouraged
and very, very willing to participate
in fundraising campaigns like this.
-Yeah, and they raised a lot,
and you'll see that in these yearbooks.
We're going to turn to another one to kind of continue
to talk about or see a common theme
that we've already actually seen,
and that is the gold star.
So you'll see as you flip through this collection,
this is a common term for what we just saw.
-So this is a yearbook -- So we left the West Coast.
-All the way to New York.
-This is a yearbook from Kenmore.
Believe it's in upstate New York,
and here we see two terms that we've already spoken about
but had very different meanings between now and then.
-Mm-hmm. -Gold star, we've already
talked about what that means,
but even the term now that we still use, an honor roll,
where today we use that for students who are...
-Academic achievement.
-...academic achievements, have gotten a high enough GPA,
but there, they used it again
to show students who were in service
or who were serving or who passed away in service,
and even things like the student council,
we have those in most of our junior
and middle and high schools,
a student government where students can learn
about the democratic process
and make choices and decisions for their class.
We see the student council from Kenmore to the right, there,
and just to show how the war really purveyed in everything,
we see a picture of the big three behind these students.
We see Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
the president of the United States at that time,
in the center, flanked by Winston Churchill,
prime minister of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain,
and something that probably would not happen today,
a picture of Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union,
a man who, in postwar,
would be vilified as a brutal,
brutal dictator and totalitarian in his own right,
but here he's one of the allies at least at this point,
so we see him on the wall as well.
-All right. Now we're going to kind of
get into the meat of our program here today
because, as I said, we really wanted to focus
this on talking about,
you know, the idea of summer approaching
and the school year coming to a close,
and I want to start off with a poll question
as we then will dig in, and we'll see a lot of this.
Now, this is an easier one for you all.
I'm going to make it a little bigger.
Talking about what you think the path of many students...
What was it after they graduated?
And we maybe have touched on this a little bit
in maybe some of the gold star and honor rolls that we've seen,
but there are a lot of choices out there.
There are a lot of choices for students today,
and, of course, there's a lot of choices back then, too,
of what you could do.
-And we'll talk about, as well, about how the education,
like everything else, was affected by World War II
and how even rites of passage like graduation
and when commencements would take place would change
and would be accelerated to meet the needs
for manpower during the war.
-All right. So this is kind of a toughie
because I think really all of these
are legitimate choices and future paths
for these almost-graduates, right?
-Absolutely. Mm-hmm.
-Joining the military, they're enlisting.
Many students did that, and some did it even
before they graduated at age 17 with their parents' consent.
-Right. -But also, yeah.
The prospect of getting a job, working in defense factories
or working in any way to support the war effort,
and the opportunities to go on to higher education
or kind of related to getting a job,
even additional training in a specific sort of trade
or craft or industry, so those are all kind of similar.
So I think these were all on the table for these students
as they figured out what their future was going to be.
-Absolutely, and for --
and speaking to boys and young men in the room,
this, World War II,
this obviously was an all-male military, so it was...
obviously, the U.S. military had a great need for manpower,
so it was made very, very attractive
with some of the promises of what they could come home to,
be it promises of future education,
being able to afford a home or to go to school
was meant to encourage folks to enlist
or to consider paths
that would put them into the military faster,
and education on the whole was militarized.
You would learn about math or world geography
through the lens of World War II.
You would learn about geography
as where the war was happening around the world.
-Mm-hmm. -Or you might learn math
by doing calculations about wind speed
or things that related to aerial combat
or what's the load-bearing weight on this bridge
that you're trying to build across this river.
So word problems and essay questions,
it might be a bit different than today.
-Yeah. That's for sure.
So to kind of kick off our analysis
in looking at these kind of spring rites
of passage, well, at least for us,
I would see it as a springtime tradition,
but for some of these schools,
you'll see it's throughout the entire year.
-Mm-hmm. -We're going to kick it off,
though, with a yearbook that we analyzed
quite a bit here at the museum,
and it's from Topeka High School in Kansas
and their 1944, kind of right in the midst of the war,
yearbook called the "Sunflower,"
and we're going to kick off with something
that happens at most high schools, if not all.
Of course, there we see the senior class,
that senior class photo.
None of this or any...
They don't look as goofy as we do, but...
-No, no.
They're much more posed and much more serious.
It seems to be the predominate pose
is sort of a head tilt.
That seems to be what the most of them were going for there.
-And of course we're going to talk about prom.
How could we not at this time of year?
-So again, guys, reading these as artifacts like we're doing,
you guys are doing what professional historians
do for a living.
We see here, analyzing both the pictures and the text,
it's spelled out very clearly.
We have prom royalty, King Bill Wall
and Queen Mary Lewis done up in their finery,
tuxedo and lovely gown
with a biography on the two pages as well.
But we're going to see
that there is another set of prom royalty as well
on the next page.
So during World War II in the United States,
not everything was a perfect society.
A perfect society doesn't exist,
but hopefully we're making our improvements
as we go on and grow as a country.
So we have two sets of prom royalty.
We have our white king and queen,
and we have our African-American king and queen,
King Lloyd and Queen Barbara.
We notice they share a single page.
It's just their first names, not their surnames,
and so this is due to the fact
that in large parts of the country during World War II,
even while we're fighting against the forces of racism
and fascism abroad,
segregation was still widely considered
legal and appropriate throughout many schools and businesses
and other organizations throughout the country.
So this yearbook we used because it really puts it
in stark terms of this false idea of separate but equal.
These folks get one last page,
and they don't even get their last names in the paper,
and this school, it's interesting.
It was academically integrated.
That is, there were racially integrated classes,
but for all activities like sports or prom,
it was kept racially segregated, so, again,
United States had work to do on cleaning up its own house,
and World War II helped accelerate
the process of kicking off
things like the Civil Rights Movement,
the equal rights for women
and other important civil rights achievements.
-And Topeka would actually become a critical place for that
when we talk about the Civil Rights Movement
in Brown Versus Board of Education...
-Yup. Yeah, right there.
-...centered around, you know, Topeka, Kansas.
So kind of interesting to see
what that looks like, you know, a little...
a decade previous to that, a little more than a decade.
-Mm-hmm. -And then we're going to turn --
So we have Kansas.
Now we're going to go further west to go to Sioux Falls,
or excuse me, just go and stay in our Midwest area
and go to Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
and go to Washington High School
and their 1943 war-year yearbook,
and we're going to continue with that royalty beauty shots here.
-Mm-hmm.
So it's important to understand, too,
that even though the war was really subsumed
all aspect of American society during this time,
young people still wanted the things
that they perceived as normal.
They wanted some degree of normalcy,
and they wanted things that they had expected in the past
before the war started.
It's like, "I want to be prom king or prom queen,"
so you see in a lot of these yearbooks,
they do address the war, but students still had vibrant,
separate student lives,
and we see here, in these really,
really high-fashion shots of the queen
and her court and attendants in this yearbook,
that students wanted some normalcy to hang onto.
Yes, they were fine with contributing to the war effort,
but they wanted some chance to be what they were,
which was young kids.
So they needed something to cling onto during the war,
and this yearbook illustrates that very, very well,
saying that they can be both patriotic
and still have social lives to experience at the same time.
-And prom is, you know, one of those things that endures from,
you know, during these times of conflict,
you know, all the way to today and previous to this.
-Mm-hmm. -All right.
And then we're going to just turn quickly now.
Again, I'm just staying here in the Midwest,
and go to Chicago to Schurz High School,
which is one of our more interesting yearbooks
because there are a few colorized pages
like this one that you see here,
and that really doesn't happen that often in 1940s yearbooks,
so...
-No, and we see a lot with yearbooks as well.
I think some of you put in your first response
that what type of information you could see from yearbooks
or learn from them about how the society was or,
you know, I think somebody even mentioned the budget
that the yearbooks or schools might have,
and that's absolutely correct.
From some of these yearbooks, we'll see they're very slim,
or there may not be that many photographs at all.
Certainly this yearbook from Schurz High School in Chicago
is an outlier.
This has, you know, beautiful full-color pages,
and it was a very, very affluent school.
The school is still standing in Chicago.
It's sort of a historic landmark now, more than a school,
but it shows one type of environment
the students could go to school in with beautiful landscaping,
a nice -- what looks like a slate roof
and really an impressive facade
at this very, very affluent school.
So we're going to look at this one.
-Get that in your head. -Keep that in your mind,
in your mind's eye as we look at...
-And then we're going to go to our next high school,
Topaz High School, which is in an itty-bitty place,
Delta, Utah,
and their 1945 yearbook, so the conclusion of the war.
Let's see where these students go to school.
-So we're in a small hamlet, really, more than a town
at this high school in Topaz,
and we see here some great signatures.
Those are always a lot of fun especially with students today.
Some people have classes still where they learn cursive script.
Some don't, so we always like
to see students pondering over them.
-Try to interpret, yeah, what you see on-screen there,
so there's this one layer of it.
What's the next layer?
-Sure, and beneath the layer of that, we see,
as opposed to the Schurz High School,
we don't see any lovely landscaping.
We don't see any slate roofs or inspiring facades.
We see some long tar-paper shacks,
barracks-style buildings,
and this is another experience
that some students
had during World War II.
This is one of the, called officially, relocation centers,
but this is a Japanese internment camp,
a Japanese-American internment camp,
which, after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Franklin Roosevelt, the president,
signed Executive Order 9066
which called for the forcible removal of Japanese-Americans
and those of Japanese-American descent
into relocation centers
or incarceration or internment centers
further inland,
away from the west coast where it was thought
they would be spies or saboteurs.
So talking about normalcy which we saw students try to re-create
in that Sioux Falls yearbook,
these students put together a yearbook
in perhaps the most abnormal environment during World War II,
congregated together, removed from their homes,
held behind...
-And their former school, too, so...
-...their...Yeah, exactly, and behind barbed wire,
kept under guard, not allowed to leave,
but trying to create
some normalcy of student life in this.
So this is a yearbook that actually came out of one
of these Japanese-American internment centers.
This one is not on our website yet,
so we wanted to share a few samples from it
because it's a real, real rich resource.
-And you can see, I think, too, trends of, like,
trying to live the normal life as best as you can,
so there's bits and pieces of this yearbook
that are in other yearbooks
that are not obviously inside of,
you know, internment camps like senior wills.
We'll actually see, I think, another one a little later one,
and they're kind of silly and funny
if you read any of them, so...
-And talking about things that are different now
than what they were then, students and young people
always have their own language which they communicate with,
their own slang and slang terms,
and that's true in these yearbooks as well,
and on the website, we actually have a sort of glossary
of slang terms from the '40s
that are fun to experience as well,
but we see the first student, here, Sokio Akihosho.
She wills her jiving to all the wallflowers,
so I guess she was a good dancer...
-Dancer. -...or at least
a more uninhibited dancer than some other students.
-Right, and so in addition to, like, slang,
I think a lot of these show, like, inside jokes, like,
things that maybe to us is like,
"I don't get it. I don't get that," you know,
but again, being in that school environment,
you guys all know that you have inside jokes
with your friends or your class,
and you can see that kind of on display here.
-Sure. -So if you kind of ponder
what some of these mean,
really, you know, I like the one on the bottom
in the first column
that Yas leaves for better or for worse, so...
-Yeah. -And, of course,
there's also senior superlatives which also show up
in a lot of yearbooks like most popular,
most handsome, most attractive,
and so you can see all of those students,
here, on the left-hand side,
and see a little bit more of where they lived
and where they went to school on the right-hand side.
-Yeah, very dusty, very remote,
a real sort of lack of facilities,
so it's a wonder they were able to create something this clean
and really this ambitious.
This yearbook is very, very, very, very broad
in showing the aspect of student life
in these camps, and this...
We also see this shows senior graduates from the fall term.
-Mm. -I think we'll talk about
that a bit more in another yearbook,
how they had different class commencements as well.
-Yeah. Mm-hmm.
And also kind of interesting related to then, finally,
there's a page in here about graduates,
and we see, of course, in the typical cap and gown,
and I think this is also forward thinking as well,
like, many dedications,
but it also says something kind of interesting
that we underlined in red --
"Though their number has been greatly decreased,
their spirit of comradeship
has united them through their high school years."
What does that mean? -It's...
I mean, it could mean a number of things,
but obviously it's reflecting that, again, like our previous
poll question was,
where were a lot of military-age young men
going before or after high school was completed?
They were going into the military,
and then also the understanding
that people were, you know,
taken away from their homes and sent to these places.
So the number has been greatly decreased as the camps
were set up and then closed,
but the spirit of comradeship
has united them throughout their high school years.
-All right.
And then we're going to now go to the East Coast
and go to Dartmouth, Massachusetts,
to look at the 1943 "Harpoon"
for some more senior-related stuff,
and one of our favorites,
another kind of inside-jokey sort of one
that we don't totally get,
but seniors in a nutshell, which is a great page in here.
-So we see, you know,
it's where students were allowed to submit their own,
you know, their own superlatives,
pondering when they were happiest
but then also their probable fates,
you know, seeing things from jobs like typists,
or receptionists or hairdressers,
to things, like, very succinct, probable fate, married.
So it's talking about the different expectations, too,
of women working outside the home
that changed during World War II,
but then some who still aspired to what was
then probably seen as sort of normalcy of staying home
and working in the home as well.
And then we see, as well, by each of the student portraits,
what their focus was on in terms
of the course that they had pursued.
We see commercial and agricultural
and some of the classes
they took as well with Eleanor and Melvin down there,
and Melvin not looking nearly as happy as Eleanor
to have his photo taken.
-Yeah.
She looks maybe ready to graduate
and maybe him, I don't know, not so much.
All right.
And then we're going to travel to Central High School
in Duluth, Minnesota,
and this is, again, the 1945,
towards the end of the war, yearbook, and more of...
This is another one that kind of makes us smile
and kind of be like, "Huh?" -Yeah.
It's great because it's, you know,
they actually gave out sort of, you know,
physical representations of these awards.
We see, I think, the young lady on the right,
what's almost like a big bowl, and then the...
-Then the guy has a big spoon, right?
-The guy has a big spoon,
and some of these, as well, we know from yearbooks today,
most of the superlatives are positive,
but the student with the spoon,
the male, he's actually been awarded of the...
His nomination says,
"Homeliest boy," which is, I think, sort of, like...
-Generally an insult, don't you think?
-Yeah, sort of, like, plainest
or not the least attractive young man,
which I think is completely unfair.
He looks like a... -Normal person.
-...you know, normal teenager.
So yeah.
The idea of putting sort of negative
superlatives in a yearbook, it was...
It certainly, I don't think, would happen today, but yeah,
great visuals and great images showing students
whiling away the hours, but then, yeah.
These actual physical trophies, hardware that got for being...
for their superlatives.
-Yeah, for their superlatives, the most, the least, whatever.
So...and then let's go to...
This is a cool yearbook for a lot of reasons.
We're not going to look at all of it today, the "Daisy Chain,"
which is in Waco, Texas, and notice,
talking about what Collin mentioned before,
this is one of the coolest covers,
and it has a military theme throughout the entire yearbook.
-And that was not uncommon that the students would take
on a military or martial theme for their class yearbook.
Here we see a dive bomber, and on the page of this yearbook,
which is scanned in on the ww2yearbooks.org website,
we see images in the margin area
of descending paratroopers, machine gunners.
-Let's see if we can get to it.
There we go. -Yeah, perfect.
So this whole yearbook has a martial or military theme,
even down to the class portraits.
We see the two folks here who were kings
or presidents of their class
posing by a plane at an air base,
and, two, if you can zoom in or look at the...
-Underline, there.
-...the underlining that we've done,
we see that the young man, Bobby Martin,
he's graduating in the mid-year class,
and I believe... -Let's see...is she...
-...Bobbie, I believe her name is...
-I think she's also Bobbie, which is spelled with an I, E.
-Bobbie with an I, E is graduating with the June class.
So this was done, like we said,
to get students out of school faster
and to get them into the military quicker.
So instead of a typical fall-to-spring semester,
you would have maybe two,
sometimes three graduations per year.
-Yeah. -So students' education...
-So, summer, right? -Absolutely.
They would have graduations in January,
graduations in June, sometimes in August,
typically how colleges work these days,
but even then did the idea of getting students
out into the military
or available to do war work on the home front.
-All right.
So we are going to switch and continue to
the Broadway High School.
This is another great one here, and it's the "Sealth" --
I hope I'm saying that right -- yearbook from Seattle,
and this one has a lot of awesome little tidbits
in it, too, and, as I said,
we're going to analyze a couple of them here.
For Mrs. Erics, oh, she said she can't hear me.
I think all of you can still hear me,
and she might just need to refresh the room.
But let's look at something, a theme that we've already kind
of touched on again and again, but some good cartoons here.
-So I remember working on,
when I was in my school newspaper in the late '90s,
we were still manually laying things out on dummy sheets
and things like that,
and I'm sure now it's all done with computer programs,
laying things out.
However, things back in the 1940s were much more homemade.
We see, actually, line and cartoon drawings
in these yearbooks,
and so we see a sort of caricature of a sergeant
with a big, big, big jaw
pointing to the seniors who were leaving school to join.
To join what?
They don't even have to say what to join.
It's implied they're leaving to join the military.
-Mm-hmm. -That's how universal
the war was in people's minds.
-And look how long...I mean, that is a long list of people,
you know, to be going off and joining.
And then I love the other cartoon, too.
I guess if we have any seniors in the room,
they can understand this one a little bit.
-Seniors or even, you know, people...
If you're the high class at your elementary
or junior or middle school,
it's obviously a senior looking sort of
at a caricature freshman,
and he's saying, "Gosh, they get smaller every year,"
which I'm sure some of you have experienced seeing people...
-When you're a freshman or a senior.
-...or as a senior today, wondering,
"Who are these children that are suddenly walking the halls,
and what are they doing here?
-There's some common themes. All right.
Now we're going to travel
to West Division High School in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, to see, oh, this is another Wally...
Is this Wally West Side, right...
-Yeah. -...their kind of weird mascot,
but we found this,
and I think a lot of it's inside-jokey sort of stuff,
but secret senior statistics.
-So some of these, you'll...
Like, schools have mascots.
Some schools would have their mascots sort of be, like,
a narrator or sort of a storyteller in these yearbooks,
so we have Wally West Side, this guy with the crossed eyes
and, like, sort of a zoot suit,
and I think he's holding a microphone in his hand,
giving some secret senior stats,
which I think is probably just more doing
some quick-and-easy math,
but things like the total number of graduates, 105.5,
one is making up the other half in June,
and so I guess one didn't finish all his coursework in time,
how tall or how much everyone weighed in total,
but then, also, things like the total number of lipsticks used,
depending on the number of lips
and how active they are is listed as 1,040.
So sort of inside-jokey, like Chrissy said,
but also giving a nice snapshot of this wartime school.
-All right.
And then they have this really dramatic cartoon about,
"All right, now what," you know?
-So it's a great composite image.
I think it's one of the first pages of the yearbook
showing this recent graduate from West Side in Milwaukee
sort of either dreaming or fantasizing
or even realizing what's going to come next for him,
which is enlistment in the military.
So you see this really done effectively here in this image,
with the cap and gown being the place with the uniform
and the gun,
and then also, again, terms that are...
may not be very familiar to people
who aren't deep into World War II history
or have family members who served in the military,
another cartoon from West Side High
where someone is handing out a diploma to a recent graduate
and it says, "It behooves me to present you your diploma,
and, oh, yes. Here is your draft notice.
You are now 1-A,"
and 1-A meant someone who was very healthy,
had no family or job ties that would prevent them
from joining the military immediately.
So this guy is being given basically his diploma
and his notice
to report for military service at the same time.
-Right. So think about that reality of,
you know, what's going to be next, here, and, oh.
Before we actually tour the yearbooks,
I actually thought one last poll question.
We've seen a lot about students' futures here,
and we've discussed it kind of at length,
but I want you to think of where you are now, or again,
whether you're elementary school,
middle school, high school.
If people were looking at your own yearbook,
wouldn't necessarily say high school,
70 years or so in the future,
what would be some of the themes and messages
whether from your school,
from your community or town, from even our country,
and what do you think that might be...
What do you think people like us,
70 years in the future, will be analyzing?
-And it's... This is a great collection
that we love having here, at the museum,
teaching about World War II history,
but this is really a lesson or an exercise
that can be adapted for really any time period.
If your school is old enough,
you can look in your school library,
or your school librarian may have some old yearbooks
from maybe the World War II era,
but maybe there are '50s, '60s and '70s,
and you can analyze it for what looks different
from hairstyles and clothes,
but then also what they choose
to capture or chronicle in there,
so you can use it to learn about World War II,
certainly, but also the Civil Rights Movement...
-Yeah. -...Korea, Vietnam,
all the things all the way up to the present
that students were interested in
and felt needed to be documented.
-Even in ours,
even though I feel like, "Oh, that's not that long ago,"
I mean, even look at how different our hair,
our, you know, look is compared to students today.
-Sure. -And so...
-And then also just the things that didn't exist
or that existed in the 1940s yearbooks
that obviously wouldn't exist in a current one,
be it sports or, you know,
how they're laid out
and how they communicate. -All right.
We're going to give you a little bit more time.
Someone is actually
kind of sharing with us their personal...
Maybe they have a personal senior page.
I had that in my high school
where it was like you knew all about,
and it was with multiple pictures
and what you were interested in and what you liked,
so sometimes really putting your personality out there
on those pages in a very permanent way,
especially if you're a senior.
So while you guys are thinking about this,
and we can... Oh, yeah.
That's good.
We...I'll leave this poll question
open kind of underneath us, here,
and you can continue to submit,
and then I'll broadcast the results,
but while we're doing this, I just want to briefly
give you guys a little virtual tour of the site,
and so give me a second
to do that to share my screen with everybody
so we can see what this site looks like
and see what you can explore, here, further.
All right.
So we are going to go here, and you should hopefully see,
in a second, the See You Next Year! website,
which is ww2yearbooks.org,
and, of course, there's a brief introduction,
and if you scroll down,
you can see all of the yearbooks we have digitized thus far.
You may notice, like, actually the people
who were calling out in Florida earlier,
your state might not be on here.
So we're actually still trying to collect some yearbooks,
and we'll go through that list, here, at the end of the program.
You can see that we do add some frequently,
and there's some that we didn't touch on today
that are really great,
and so even more of the same kind of themes
that we'd look at,
and when you go to each page, you'll see that, of course,
where this is from, the fate of the school right now,
specific names to look for,
vocabulary that we see kind of consistently used in here,
and I think my favorite feature is
that you can digitally scroll through these yearbooks,
so you can see.
You could scroll through and see, of course, again,
this very common military theme of this Albert Lea High School,
graduating and onto potentially serving.
So this is a really fun...
You could just spend hours sitting here.
And this is more for our teachers.
Collin created different lesson plans that are related to this,
so you can actually dig in.
Have your students really get into this site
related to these specific lesson plans, and then,
of course, lastly, we've got some oral histories as well,
so you can hear from people who were high schoolers
during World War II
being interviewed by high schoolers here in New Orleans,
so it's kind of your multi-generational interview,
and then lastly, of course,
talking about the states that we still need,
and you can donate a yearbook on here.
I don't...While I stop sharing, I'm going to,
in a second, show you guys what states we still need,
so let me stop sharing and make that hide,
and let's share and broadcast some of your results.
Okay.
So, as I said, someone was really sharing with us
what they think people will remember about them.
They're crazy about cats, but yeah.
The great things that you experience, inside jokes,
plays, proms, sports and, of course, graduation, too.
-And technology. I mean, this is the...
This is, I mean, this is an era that we're dealing with
where it's, you know, there's, you know, no Internet.
You know, television doesn't really exist,
so things that can change as well.
I mean, the fact that we, you know, almost all of us have,
you know, smartphones we walk around with,
something like that where it's really the unthinkable,
so in terms of capturing images and portraits,
you might have your photo taken a few dozen times
in your life in the 1940s
whereas, you know, we can do that at-will now,
so capturing these moments becomes a lot, lot easier, too,
and how that influences what people share.
And that's how, you know, Facebook even began.
It began, basically, as a virtual yearbook site
before it became sort of a social-media site.
-Right, right. So yeah, so, just, I mean,
thinking about how we will put a lens on this
70 plus years in the future, and you're right.
It's not just about even what's going on at your school locally,
but even, as I said, a national lens
with someone saying politics as well.
-Mm-hmm. -So yeah.
People will be looking at how young people felt
about how we look at how young people felt about the war.
-Yup. -We'll look back then
to see how young people maybe felt about,
you know, the election and things like that,
so a lot of interesting things to dig in there.
Collin, before we kind of close out and see
if anybody has any questions, any kind of final thoughts on,
you know, what we've seen here today?
-All right. This is a great way for students
to see themselves reflected in history.
I think a lot of people like myself...
I've always been interested in history,
but I know some people really have not a dislike
but they don't think history has anything to do with them,
and seeing this really putting the student element
right in the center of it
as opposed to sort of being an afterthought
or not represented at all,
it's a really fun way to learn about World War II
from a student's eye view,
but then also, if you can find one from your area or state,
how people in your home state, county or region of the world
were experiencing this just,
you know, great, great turning point in 20th century history,
and it's been a lot of fun to work on,
and I hope you've enjoyed seeing the slides we've had to present.
-So yeah.
As you know, that's the website you can go to.
Actually, we're going to transition into one more area,
and you're actually going to see Collin and I, like,
officially go away on the webcam,
so bye in that regard, but we'll do Q and A.
Actually, no. Actually, well, let's do...
See if anybody has any questions now
before we transition and show you what slides
or what yearbooks we still need.
So all right.
Let's show you guys what we still need, here,
and we'll let that presentation pop up,
but we have many states,
and sometimes we have multiple yearbooks from states,
but there are a lot of states
where we also do not have a yearbook yet,
and if you see your state on here,
maybe you can bug your librarian at your school
to see if they would be even willing to lend us one
to even scan to be part of this collection,
so I think we saw Florida on here.
-Yeah. You know, Weeki Wachee,
I went there on vacation a couple years ago.
I love the mermaids, so it could be a yearbook
from that part of the world.
We know it's...The elements are not kind to paper artifacts,
especially areas that are prone to tropical weather like we are,
so Mississippi, Alabama, Florida,
we know those are definite concerns.
-Yeah, and it took us a little bit
even to get Louisiana yearbooks
because a lot has been destroyed,
and, you know, like, all these states and hurricanes
and flooding and all that kind of stuff.
Before we transition, I'll show you a few more slides, here.
For teachers, especially, if you didn't get
that yearbook teacher guide,
it's right below that Q and A pod,
so be sure to download that.
I'll also resend it again one more time.
Of course, we've kind of went through a tour
of what this site has to offer,
and then, lastly, for our teachers,
if you're looking for more World War II lesson plans
that aren't maybe this specific,
we have many more lesson plans on ww2classroom.org,
and right now you'll see lesson plans
related to the war in the Pacific.
Very shortly, there will be lesson plans
about the war in Europe,
so you can really have a full suite of curriculum
when you get into the meat of teaching World War II,
and, actually, you know what?
That's about it for all of us here.
Collin and I were so pleased to present to you guys today.
-Mm-hmm. -This is our final webinar
for the school year.
Sniff, sniff, sad.
But we really appreciate all your participation.
-Absolutely, and no.
It's like the name of the website says.
You know, you can see... See you next year,
when we will have more programs to present.
-Yeah. Literally. We will see you next year, so...
And again, if anybody wants to share
their embarrassing yearbook photos with us...
-Please. -...you know how
to get ahold of us here,
so you'll maybe make us feel a little bit better
about putting our high school selves out there
for the world to see.
But anyway, from Chrissy and Collin at the National...