The Liberty High School Annual for 1919 was the first-ever yearbook Liberty High School published.
About yearbooks
High school yearbooks are one form of history within which everyone is recorded when they graduate from high school. They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps. Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers, the sense of humor of the era, the area businesses – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.
1919 versus today
The class of 1919 graduated before a period of major social change, as a cursory examination of the yearbook will demonstrate. First off, the size of the class demonstrated the extent to which completion of a high school education was not a general expectation. In a community that had not changed that much in size between 1919 and the later, post WWII yearbooks we republish, this graduating class is tiny. Viewing the credentials of the faculty, it’s clear that the expectation that a high school teacher would have even a baccalaureate degree is a creature of the near-century that elapsed since this class graduated.
The function of the yearbook has also changed, quite clearly. More recent yearbooks are almost entirely about the class graduating, and on the activities in which they were participants. This issue turns the focus back to those who went to Liberty High School in previous years, even decades. From our point of view today, capturing this much news about Liberty High School alumni dating back into the previous century (the first class with alumni reporting was the class of 1893) is a book for those searching for a larger population than a single year’s graduating class.
It’s available!
You’ll not be surprised that we’re offering the Liberty High School Annual for 1919 as a download. Interested? CLICK HERE to see it on our main website.
