School Yearbook - by Kate Eichhorn (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Why school yearbooks-as frivolous and cringey as they are-are far more than just objects of nostalgia. We're all familiar with the embarrassment that washes over us when recalling our high school yearbooks. Questionable fashion choices, gravity-defying hair, a melodramatic quote-what were we thinking? Even as school yearbooks decline in popularity among contemporary teens, they continue to impact our lives in shocking ways. Collected, digitized, aggregated, and recombined in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few decades ago, yearbooks are no longer bound personal archives of adolescent memories. In the twenty-first century, they are shaping our lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. And what could be a more fitting afterlife for these cringey books? In School Yearbook, cultural critic Kate Eichhorn investigates this ubiquitous object. On the surface, school yearbooks are easily dismissed as innocuous collections of embarrassing photographs and cheesy affirmations, but as Eichhorn reveals, there has never been anything innocent about the school yearbook tradition. Since the early twentieth century, yearbooks have circulated as forms of public relations, propaganda, and hate speech. They have been routinely used by police detectives, private investigators, and even the FBI to identify and profile suspects. With over half a million yearbooks now available online, these books have also acquired the power to continue shaping our lives long after graduation. Would-be landlords, employers, and even creditors can now turn to data culled from their embarrassing pages to make judgments about who we are and what we merit. In a digital era, school yearbooks have acquired the ability to keep judging us in perpetuity. Both timely and insightful, School Yearbook explores how these books have always been used to rank and judge us"--

Book Synopsis

Why school yearbooks--as frivolous and cringey as they are--are far more than just objects of nostalgia.

We're all familiar with the embarrassment that washes over us when recalling our high school yearbooks. Questionable fashion choices, gravity-defying hair, a melodramatic quote--what were we thinking? Even as school yearbooks decline in popularity among contemporary teens, they continue to impact our lives in shocking ways. Collected, digitized, aggregated, and recombined in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few decades ago, yearbooks are no longer bound personal archives of adolescent memories. In the twenty-first century, they are shaping our lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. And what could be a more fitting afterlife for these cringey books?

In School Yearbook, cultural critic Kate Eichhorn investigates this ubiquitous object. On the surface, school yearbooks are easily dismissed as innocuous collections of embarrassing photographs and cheesy affirmations, but as Eichhorn reveals, there has never been anything innocent about the school yearbook tradition. Since the early twentieth century, yearbooks have circulated as forms of public relations, propaganda, and hate speech. They have been routinely used by police detectives, private investigators, and even the FBI to identify and profile suspects. With over half a million yearbooks now available online, these books have also acquired the power to continue shaping our lives long after graduation. Would-be landlords, employers, and even creditors can now turn to data culled from their embarrassing pages to make judgments about who we are and what we merit.

In a digital era, school yearbooks have acquired the ability to keep judging us in perpetuity. Both timely and insightful, School Yearbook explores how these books have always been used to rank and judge us.

Review Quotes

"The heart of this book is a consideration of the high school yearbook as an American institution with more than a century of historical practice behind it. The yearbook has been so central to American life that telling these stories here will draw interest from a wide range of readers--not just academics in history, education, or journalism, but also teachers and former students of American high schools. Eichhorn and her research team were able detectives who identified interesting questions and knew where to look to find meaningful answers." --Henry Jenkins, author of 'Where the Wild Things Were: American Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Postwar America'

"--Jonathan Zimmerman, author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools'

About the Author

Kate Eichhorn is a cultural critic and media historian and professor of culture and media studies at The New School. Her most recent books include The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media and Content.