We’ve just re-published the 1942 Libertas yearbook from Liberty High School in Liberty, Sullivan County, New York.
You can be excused if your immediate response is “What? You’ve published another Liberty High School yearbook? What’s your plan? To re-publish all of them?”
To tell the truth, we wouldn’t mind re-publishing all of Liberty High’s historic yearbooks, but realism tells us that we could never possibly find copies of all of them to scan — which gets us around to why the 1942 Libertas is different and interesting.
A Wartime Yearbook
First of all, it is a wartime yearbook! Published only months after Pearl Harbor, it is still the only example from Liberty High School that we have of this genre. There are many things that this yearbook has in common with non-wartime yearbooks (it has all the usual contents, for example, including photos with names of grades seven through twelve, and abundant advertisements) but the moment you pick the original up you notice that it has a soft cover rather than the typical hardbound book cover.
Later in the war, yearbooks began to reflect a nation actively gearing to to support the war efforts. Later yearbooks included lists of students who had left high school to serve and, eventually, in memoriam pages for those who would not be returning home.
Nonetheless, this is indeed a wartime yearbook. We think it’s worth a look. You can do so, and, if you wish, purchase a download of it, on our Liberty, NY page. CLICK HERE to go directly there.