Yearbook- pesearch paper possibilities

I wanted to try to compile a list of topics for students to look up for their "formal writing projects" in every class. This proved to be a challenge when it came to Yearbook. You can find individual school histories and yearbooks online, but there's nothing that says when schools started publishing yearbooks or why.

One researcher in Marysville, Washington put it this way:

"There isn't a whole lot of yearbook history online. So when I tell you that the oldest yearbook known to have been printed in the United States is a 1806 Yale University one I'm using up most of the on-line history."

This is about all she could offer as to the evolution of yearbooks:

Alumni Directories
-Full of biographical sketches of the graduates
-Predates the commercially viable letterpress printing process and the use of halftone printing process that allowed true and cheap reproduction of pictures.

Art and Literary Magazine
-Quarterly magazines (some times monthly) were very common around the turn of the century through the 1920's. These books were always soft cover and stapled. As the name says these books were the product of student writers and artists who published these books 4 times a year. The Fall issue was dedicated to football and the June issue was full of pictures of the Senior Class.

Picture Yearbooks
-Yearly books contained all same information that was common in the Quarterly Magazine yearbooks of that time. So they had student works of fiction and poems, cartoons, senior pictures in one volume. By the 1940 student works of literature, joke pages, alumni pages, and calendars where replaced by candid photographs and individual portraits of all students.

I'm leaning on topics having to do with prominent graphic designers, or aspects of design or publishing, or maybe the history of major magazines...

I guess we'll see. Watch this website for more.
Meanwhile- great job on brainstorming a theme. Thanks!
Next week we'll start talking about coverage.