August 2025
To celebrate the start of a new academic year, this month Special Collections is featuring a collage of photographs from their University Archives. They were taken just three years after the West Tennessee State Normal School was established in 1912, with Seymour A. Mynders as president. These black and white images offer a fascinating glimpse into academic life, fashions of the day, and the types of social activities that students engaged in. They also serve as a visual record of a generation on the precipice of modernity, while grappling with the upheaval of World War I. Present-day students might see how the images mirror today’s college life in similar ways, with students and professors depicted mingling and posing on campus and around town. In over 100 years, many things have changed, but students balancing the seriousness of academic pursuit along with establishing their identity and place in the world continues to this day.
For more glimpses of student life throughout the years, a sampling of Special Collections’ University Archives photographs is viewable at: https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-ph/
The Item of the Month is a specially selected item (book, photograph, ephemera, artifact, etc.) that members of the University Libraries' Special Collections Department would like to highlight each month to show the breadth and variety of their collections.
Text from this post is by Grace Neeley, Archivist/Librarian, Assistant Professor, Special Collections. She can be reached at gneeley@memphis.edu.
