Snapshots of the Public History Collaborative

By: Michelle K. Berry 11/17/23

Home has many meanings. To some with a strong sense of place, home is a physical locality. For others, home is about relationships with people, animals, food, scents, even music. Memory, whether difficult or happy, can be considered home especially for someone feeling displaced in their current situation. No matter one’s definition of home, the word and the idea suggest connection. Homecomings can be emotionally fraught experiences or they can be delightful or maybe an interesting combination of both.

On November 4, 2023, the PHC hosted a table in College Village at the University of Arizona’s Homecoming celebration. Volunteers for the Public History Collaborative including faculty members and graduate students created a game inspired by the New York Times event chronology game. Taking photos from old University of Arizona Yearbooks, the volunteers created a game board for alumni and other tent visitors to try their hand at identifying photographs from the university’s history.

The photos showed a variety of historical developments in the history of the University. The yearbooks have been digitized by UArizona Libraries Special Collections, and you can go peruse them here! According to the library website, “this digital collection of the University of Arizona yearbooks contains a complete run of The Desert from its first issue in 1903 through its final issue in 2005.  The yearbook began annual publication in 1913 under the name El Sahuaro with the name changed to The Desert the following year.”

Women’s attire in the early 20th century piqued the interest of many visitors. They noted the high necks and long lengths of the dresses women wore and wondered if they were hot in those pre-air conditioned days of yore. The evolution of football uniforms also was noted – from merely donning sweaters and small helmets to the highly protective gear of today the increased concern over athlete protection was very apparent. The photo most everyone got “right” and even chose to begin their photo timelines with was one of the first pictures of Old Main surrounded by nothing but agricultural fields.

Those brave enough to play the game did a terrific job using clues in the photographs to guess the approximate year. Historians who use photographs in their research must often seek out clues in similar ways to learn about aspects of their topic that are not readily apparent in the written or oral sources they use. Many archives have vast photographic collections. The Library of Congress and the National Archives are two of the most well known in the United States. In Tucson, we are fortunate to have Special Collections at the University, the Center for Creative Photography, the Arizona Historical Society, Saguaro National Park, and many other sites that preserve the visual record of Tucson and southern Arizona’s past. Of course with the near ubiquity of smart phones with cameras and widely available platforms of social media, individuals are curating their own pictorial histories. How historians will utilize these vast collections in the future remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that never in the history of humanity have so many photographs of so many different people and experiences been so available.

L-R Participants in the Photo Timeline Game; Katherine Morrissey aids participants in thinking about what the images show; Dean Lori Poloni-Staudinger of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences played along (and got most of them right!) . All photos by: Michelle K. Berry

The alumni we met shared stories about the University of Arizona and its importance to their pasts and their presents (and in some cases their futures). Most all of them explained that whenever they come back to campus it always feels like coming home.

What does home mean to you?