This week Dr. French was able to bring us all of Howard’s PTA scrapbooks, ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s. These books contain tons of ephemera such as pamphlets, menus, performance programs, and prom invitations. There were also calendars, PTA meeting itineraries, newspaper articles, photographs, and even clips of hair in the first scrapbook. For this project in particular, Dr. French, Dr. Lyons, and Matt have been looking for any documentation of integration within the school and these scrapbooks are a great resource for observing the changes in the student body over the mid 19th century. However, as of now there is only one scrapbook that is not in our possession and Matt explained to me that it might be the most important when it comes to observing how the school began integration in the 60s.
Because of our recent exchanges with the school in our attempts to obtain all the material we can for this project, Dr. French advised us to make a separate inventory for the scrapbooks outside of the RICHES metadata log. This way we can keep track of what we have and the date of each book, almost like a very simplified library system.
The scrapbooks were fascinating to look through! The first book from the late 40s is very fragile and the pages are the most damaged out of all the books, so we really focused on looking through that book and making a game plan to begin scanning the pages. Given how delicate the pages are (to the point where even opening the book can cause pieces of the page to fall off), we’re definitely going to have to spend extra time making sure the book isn’t further damaged when we try capturing images of it. The book is filled with a lot more content than the book Matt had previously scanned, so that will factor into the time as well. However, given all of the very valuable information and culture within the book, it definitely seems like focusing on the book for an extended period of time will be worth it.
One of my favorite parts of the day was looking through one of the books from the 50s! When I went to Howard, I had always wondered why our mascot was a cowboy boot with a cowboy hat. (I also made fun of it all the time because who thinks of a boot with a hat as a mascot?) Well, Dr. French was flipping through the pages of one of the 50s books and found a whole insert on the origin of the emblem! It was designed by a student who had actually put a lot of thought into representing the Howard Rangers. I guess my next objective is figuring out why we were called the Rangers to begin with. Hopefully the books will have the answer!
-Kelsey R.
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