While we are wrapping up the Lee County Historic Marker project on Thursdays, it is only fitting to get the Glomerata collection up to date, too. The Glomerata is the yearbook for my alma mater. I’ve collected them for some reason. Over time, I’ve been uploading the covers as a section on the site. Pictured below, for instance, is the 1914 cover. If you click that cover you can check out today’s addition to the group, the 1917 Glomerata.

You can see my complete collection here.

Since we’re wrapping up the Lee County Historic Marker project, it seems only right to return to the Glomerata collection, too. The Glomerata is the yearbook for my alma mater. And I collect them for some reason. I have quite a few of them. And, over time, I’ve been uploading the covers as a section on the site. Pictured below, for instance, is the 1904 cover. That one has been on the site for a long time. But if you click that cover below you can check out today’s addition to the group, the 1903 Glomerata.

The 1903, by the way, is the only yearbook in the now 119 volumes that uses a horizontal orientation. You can see the whole collection, here. Want to check out a few choice volumes, dive in here.

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. I’m still adding new-to-me editions to my collection and so here we are today. The one I’m showing you here is the 1993 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 1994 Glom.

See all of the covers in my Glom collection here.

Bill Clinton was the president. No one had thought yet of shutting down the government and we were a long way from our national debate on the meaning of the word “is.” NAFTA and Nancy Kerrigan were in the news and people were still saying “information superhighway.” Others were still struggling to pronounce Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Scream was stolen, the Olympics were in Lillehammer and American troops withdrew from Somalia. Kurt Cobain killed himself. Tonya Harding pled guilty and Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Richard Nixon died.

Students in the fall before, if they followed the news, learned more about Sydney and Mogadishu and worried about an uprising in Moscow and nuclear tests in China. Early that fall I decided, for sure, that I wanted to go to Auburn. I’d had ideas previously, but that fall I made some visits and fell for the place.

There were 263 million people in the U.S. in 1994. Some 4.26 million of them were in Alabama, more than double the pre-World War II census. Guy Hunt, the first Republican governor Alabama had known since Reconstruction, had just left office as Alabama’s first governor removed from office for a criminal conviction. He paid his fines and served his probation and got a pardon. Considered by some to be an accidental governor, he was considered a bumpkin by opponents but took advantage of a splintered Democratic party. Trivia: A minister, farmer and salesman, Hunt was the last governor of Alabama that didn’t attend college. He fought in Korea instead. He’s also a man who made Alabama a two-party state. And now, of course, state politics have tipped entirely the other direction. Guy Hunt died in 2009. When he stepped down, he was succeeded in 1993 by his lieutenant governor, Jim Folsom, Jr. He ran in 1994, but was beaten by the former-Democrat-turned-Republican (and Auburn grad) Fob James. James was returning to an office he’d held 20 years earlier. Folsom would show up, a decade later, again as lieutenant governor. (Alabama is a cyclical place.)

Alabama, and much of the southeast, was hit hard by an ice storm in 1994. Heather Whitestone, who would later become Miss America, was enjoying her time as Miss Alabama. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, was in the middle of a nine-year stretch of triple-digit homicides. Local boy and NASCAR hero Davey Allison died in a helicopter accident. I was busy navigating high school. As if that was all.

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 2011 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 2008 Glom.

There is a lot about the oughts that doesn’t make sense to modern sociologists. For the 2007-08 school year Lost was the top television show, Transformers was a top-10 movie, people still thought they liked Chris Brown and Joe the Plumber was somehow a stand-in for us all. George W. Bush was still president, Bob Riley was the governor.

The summer of 2007 ended, and students returned to campus, as 572 people were killed in suicide bombings in Iraq and 512 died in an 8.0 earthquake in Peru. And to really set the tone for the weekend, Russia announced their bombers were set to resume flights for the first time since the Cold War. That fall Marion Jones gave up her five gold medals and Vladimir Putin was named Time’s man of the year. Luciano Pavarotti died, as did Gen. Paul Tibbets — pilot of the Enola Gay — Evel Knievel and Norman Mailer.

In January of 2008 fuel crossed $100/barrel for the first time ever, Fidel Castro finally stepped down in Cuba, surgeons perform the first operations using bionic eyes in London and more than 133,000 were killed by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Edmund Hillary, Heath Ledger, Roy Scheider, Arthur C. Clarke and Charlton Heston also died in the first part of the year.

Also, it was the beginning of the poorly named Great Recession in the United States. A lot of things about the oughts remain baffling indeed.

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. We’re shaking things up and featuring the most recent installment of my collection. The one I’m showing you here is the 2012 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 2011 Glom.

History doesn’t tell us much about those ancient days in 2011. Barack Obama was president, Bob Riley was the governor. As students made their way back to campus the previous fall the H1N1 influenza pandemic was declared over by the WHO. The International Space Station broke a record for the longest continually inhabited structure in space. An earthquake in New Zealand was the first in a series of temblors over the next two years that baffled seismologists into saying such a thing is unlikely to ever happen again in precisely that sort of circumstances. The first total lunar eclipse to occur on the Northern winter solstice and Southern summer solstice since 1638 took place.

And then there were the holidays and the bowl games and Auburn won a national championship in football. That’s all in this book. This is the inside back cover, which is a happy and bittersweet thing now:

In the spring of 2011 more than 324 people lost their lives in tornados in Alabama, Mississippi and elsewhere. It was one of the largest and one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks ever recorded.