Prom queens, football teams, graduation day. The activities and archetypes of American high school life are central to so many movies, books, and recurring nightmares that they seem almost timeless, without history. Really, they’re relatively recent arrivals, along with the American high school itself and the idealized vision of a national future it once promised.
Emerging in the early twentieth century, modern American high schools standardized curricula and activities while vastly expanding enrollment, producing graduates ready-made to join a similarly standardized—and rapidly growing—industrial workforce. Together, these developments created a common American youth experience, as well as promised mass entry to a burgeoning middle class. And, at about the same time, these increasingly standardized experiences were represented (and reaffirmed) in similarly standardized annual records: yearbooks.
In his case study of Cleveland high schools and the cultural work of schooling in the early twentieth century, Patrick J. Ryan observes: “One could justifiably claim that comprehensive public high schooling is as indicative of American society as any institution. If so, our interpretation of it should be central to our understanding of the country.” The Cleveland Public Library’s collection of high school yearbooks provides a portrait of the rise of the American high school and the socioeconomic mobility it promised—but never quite delivered.
In the nineteenth century, Cleveland was a trailblazer in public education. Home to the first free public high school in the state (Central High School, founded 1846), it also offered integrated education by the 1840s. Indeed, celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes graduated from Central High in 1920, where he was yearbook editor, “Class Poet,” and named “best eyes” of his class.
High school yearbooks, meanwhile, evolved out of nineteenth century student-made autograph books and scrapbooks, which gathered ephemera that captured both the communal and personal experiences of collegiate life. By the early 1900s, high school yearbooks had reached a state of mature uniformity: mass produced by the schools themselves rather than individual students, they consistently featured posed portraits of students and faculty, along with photos of clubs and sports teams.