In 1635, the first public school in what would become the United States opened for classes. The Boston Latin School admitted only boys and focused on a humanities curriculum. The first “yearbooks” and their signatures can be traced back to the East Coast schools of the late 17th century, where people would sign scrapbook-style books containing hair clippings, dried flowers, newspaper articles, and other mementos of the school year.
Students would sign each other’s books with little musings or poems, or stories to reminisce about the time spent together. The practice had evolved from commonplace books, a Renaissance tradition of compiling important and memorable information into bound sheets of paper. Students were encouraged to keep the books during class, and eventually they became a place to store anything and everything their owners found interesting—including the signatures of other classmates.
The 1806 class at Yale created the first known official bound yearbook with information about the school year, the students, and the faculty. It was called Profiles of Part of the Class Graduated at Yale College—and since permanent photographs wouldn’t be invented for around 20 more years, this book included printed silhouettes of the students.
But you can thank the early American photographer George K. Warren for the yearbook as it exists today. Daguerreotypes and their easily tarnished silver plates lost popularity in the 1860s, and Warren needed a way to keep up his business. He turned to negatives, a process invented in the 1830s by William Henry Fox Talbot that evolved over the years to a point where Warren could print multiple images from one negative. He moved his career in a new direction, taking individual portraits and full class pictures, then selling those images to students who had them all bound into class yearbooks.
When photographs weren’t available, student names were simply printed in a book, sometimes alongside drawings, and classmates would sign in the empty space. In other cases, like one from East St. Louis High School in 1914, the yearbooks would take on the original scrapbook style, full of mementos like pressed leaves.