‘See You Next Year’ – High School Yearbooks from WWII

Over the past year, The National WWII Museum’s Education Department has been soliciting, collecting, investigating and using our growing collection of high school yearbooks from WWII.  Over the past few months, we have begun a new project of scanning in select full-pages from yearbooks rich in WWII-themed content and images of 1940’s student life.  These images are to be used in a new online initiative that, when completed, will allow users to ‘flip through’ select pages from yearbooks from every state in the Union in order to understand the experience of war on the Home Front in a unique and exciting new way as well as on a more personal and local level.

Today we selected a handful of some of our recent favorites and added them to our Take A Closer Look gallery of primary sources.  Click below to view some of our selections or visit the entire gallery here:

All learners become excited by history when they are able to see aspects of themselves represented in it, which is one of the key reasons behind using wartime yearbooks to teach history.  When completed, this new Museum resource will place today’s students at the center of the historic narrative as they discover how the lives of their 1940s antecedents were both similar and dissimilar to their own.

We wish thank all of our donors who have contributed copies of their yearbooks already to this effort and our collection.  Thus far, we have over 30 states represented.  Take a closer look at our ‘missing’ list below and see if you can help fill in a yearbook from a state that we’re looking for.

Copies of Yearbooks Needed From The Following States:

• Maine
• New Hampshire
• Vermont
• Rhode Island
• West Virginia
• Montana
• Wyoming
• Nebraska
• Washington
• Nevada
• Iowa
• Arkansas
• Indiana
• Alabama
• Florida
• New Mexico
• Georgia
• Alaska

‘Do you have a wartime high school yearbook that you would like to donate to the Education Department?  You need to know that it will become part of a hands-on education program, not accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection.  But it will be seen, analyzed, laughed at, wondered at, and ultimately respected by today’s generation seeking meaningful connections between their world and the Greatest Generation.

If you have a yearbook to donate, please contact Director of Education Kenneth Hoffman at educator@nationalww2museum.org.’

This post by Collin Makamson, Red Ball Express Coordinator @ The National WWII Museum