Karen <\/strong>Sternheimer, <\/strong>Sociologist, USC| March 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Michael Messner\u2019s new book,\u00a0The High School: Sports, Spirit & Citizens, 1903-2024<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a great example of how artifacts of everyday life can become data for sociological analysis. As a scholar of gender and sports, Messner realized that yearbooks serve as a window to view past constructions of both sports and gender.<\/p>\n His own high school, Salinas High School, seemed like a natural fit, as he had about 30 years of books\u2014not just his own, because his father served as a coach for nearly 30 years and other family members attended, he had decades of books. The book blends the author\u2019s memories (and occasionally his niece\u2019s reflections, who attended more recently) with\u00a0content analysis<\/a>\u00a0of the number of pages spent on boys\u2019 sports compared with girls\u2019 sports.<\/p>\n <\/span>He observes:<\/p>\n “Yearbook photos, with their captions and text, are a unique window into the ways that high schools in general, and sports in particular, have been key drivers of shifting gender, race, and class formations. Yearbooks, like all windows, can sometimes be clear, other times foggy. And windows are always bounded by frames that create vantage points that reveal some things while concealing others” (p. 17).<\/p>\n Listen to a conversation between Michael Messner and Karen Sternheimer here:<\/strong><\/p>\n The High School Part 1<\/a><\/p>\n Yearbooks have photographers, writers, editors, and advisors who choose what goes into the books in any given year. Past yearbooks also likely shape the contents of future yearbooks, influencing what seems to \u201cnaturally\u201d belong in one.<\/p>\n My fuzzy high school memories of yearbook involvement highlight something that might be lost on twenty-first century yearbook production: the use of film. I briefly worked as a photographer on our high school yearbook and remember that due to its cost, we were limited to a small number of rolls of film (which then had to be developed, at an additional cost). Color film was even more expensive to purchase and develop, so its use was even rarer.<\/p>\n This meant we had to be much more decisive about what, who, and where to photograph than the digital photographer would need to be today. High-quality cameras that took high-resolution photos were also a rarity. The school-owned cameras were signed out to a handful of students at a time; only rarely did a student own their own 35mm camera. It was a big deal when I got my own for my sixteenth birthday.<\/p>\n Additionally, appearing in a yearbook might have less to do with one\u2019s accomplishments than with who your friends are. I happened to be friends with the editor-in-chief of our senior class\u2019s yearbook, so I appeared in many of the snapshots that ended up in our book. I got roped into dressing as a mime along with a few classmates for one of the thematic pages, which probably wouldn\u2019t have happened if I hadn\u2019t been an easy ask for my friend.<\/p>\n This is all to say that yearbooks are by nature imperfect reflections of high school, but they can provide information into who holds status at any given time.<\/p>\n And it should come as no surprise that at Salinas High, Messner found that male athletes had an outsized role in its yearbooks, with far fewer pages devoted to girls\u2019 sports for most of its history. But in his examination of more than a century of yearbooks, Messner found that the trajectory of girls\u2019 sports did not have a consistent upward trajectory since the passage of\u00a0Title IX<\/a>\u00a0in 1972\u2014which made \u201cthe failure to provide equal athletic opportunity\u201d illegal\u2014 as one might assume.<\/p>\n Instead, girls\u2019 sports participation had been presented more in the first few decades of the yearbooks, and all but disappeared the mid-twentieth century before a post Title IX revitalization. \u201cA half century before my own high school years of 1966-70,\u201d Messner recounts, \u201cthe girls at Salinas High School enjoyed a vibrant interscholastic sports program, and their teams were treated respectfully in the annual yearbooks\u201d (p. 6).<\/p>\n