#TBT in the Archives 4/9/15

The rise of social media over the past decade may make it seem like everyone is their own digital curator by posting photos, favorite quotes, and daily musings on Facebook or Twitter. This week, we wanted to highlight a nostalgic medium that predates these personal online archives: the scrapbook. Archives & Special Collections has a collection of scrapbooks dating from 1891-1984, and we have selected a few to showcase for this edition of Throwback Thursday.

The origins of scrapbooking date back to the fifteenth century in Europe. Friendship books were popular between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which were precursors to modern day yearbooks. In the scrapbooks of Shippensburg students, we can see that students put together photographs, programs, pamphlets, course curriculum documents, newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, ticket stubs, letters, and other keepsakes of their college careers. The 1895 pages pictured above showcase a Cumberland Valley State Normal School (CVSNS) pin with the school colors of the time, programs from commencement and music performances, and a clipped article about the junior play, "Our Boys." The author of the scrapbook also includes some hand-written commentary. "Class yell hurra hurrah...for the class of XCV" expresses the enthusiasm for graduation. College scrapbooks reflect a sense of school spirit while documenting an individual student's college experience.

Scrapbook covers, from top left to bottom: 1895, 1943, and 1983

The pages from a 1983 scrapbook pictured above preserve the memories of the "Midnight Magic Jr.-Sr. Formal." A flyer for the dance is accompanied by ticket stubs and permit approval allowing the sale of tickets. A short news articles addressing the upcoming formal and the limited amount of tickets still for sale is also included. Student scrapbook creators filled the pages of these books not only to preserve their mementos from events, but to capture the ephemeral moments of college life that they wanted to remember.

University news clippings appeared frequently in later Ship scrapbooks, such as in these pages from 1983. Magazine cutouts and national newspaper headlines were a more modern scrapbook trend, pasted alongside university and local news.

Pressed flowers were another popular item preserved in scrapbooks, as seen in this scrapbook that was put together by Mary Kerr Hays Main in 1895. Mary may have created this scrapbook as a school project. She wrote the Latin and family names of the flowers next to each plant. This particular scrapbook represents Mary's love of flowers and gardening, an activity she enjoyed throughout her life, and also serves as a record of the local plant life in the Shippensburg area at the turn of the 20th century.

When it comes to scrapbooks, these items are truly unique primary sources and they provide an amazing amount of information, but we should remember that these personal perspectives are also very selective. Students chose to include photographs of certain friends and tickets from certain dances and exclude others. There was certainly a reason behind their choices, just as today we all make choices about what photos to share on Instagram and what news articles to retweet on Twitter. In the pre-Internet age, scrapbooks were one way for students to document and reinforce these social connections.

You might still be scrapbooking today! Scrapbooking remains a popular hobby. If you've created a scrapbook of your Shippensburg University experience that you would like to donate to Archives & Special Collections, contact us via e-mail: specialcollections@ship.edu or phone: 717-477-1516. We're here to to preserve your Ship history for future generations!


Sources consulted:
Good, Katie Day. "From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives." New Media & Society 15, no. 4 (June 2013): 557-573.