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 2010 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 2012 Glom.
It was a bold time, way back in 2012. Barack Obama was president, Queen Elizabeth II was celebrating 60 years on the throne in England. (Maybe you recall reading about them?) There was the Arab Spring, the folding of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and CERN was getting set to announce, in the summer, the discovery of a new particle with properties consistent with the Higgs boson. Also the world was getting ready to end, because, finally, there was an inferential prophecy that we could count on. Also, a pastel version of Munch’s “The Scream” sold for $120 million
Students in the fall before wondered about the stock market as the debt ceiling crisis crimped everyone’s style. Europe was in no better financial shape. We were on Mars. The Israelis and Hamas were doing a huge prisoner exchange. Wall Street was occupied and the war in Iraq was officially ended. These were certainly not boring times, back in the sleepy years of 2011 and 2012.
There were 312 million people in the U.S. in 2012, compared to just 92 million a century earlier. Some 4.8 million of them were in Alabama, which was more than double the pre-World War II census. They called Robert Bentley their governor. Still do, in fact. Alabama was — and is, because this is two whole years ago we’re talking about here — a very Republican state. The Wiregrass and the Birmingham area feature the most Democrats in the region.
Some communities in Alabama, Mississippi and others were still trying to recover from those historic and deadly tornadoes in the spring of 2011 — 324 casualties from 355 tornadoes in a three-day period. Cleanup still continued on the coast of the massive BP oil catastrophe. In Miller vs. Alabama the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling against a 14-year-old who was convicted of murder and sentenced to a mandatory term of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. The Supremes would find that the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Immigration was a big topic in Alabama, as was football, of course. Auburn and Alabama were enjoying an amazing collaborative run at the top of the college game.
You could get married on Samford lawn at Auburn starting in 2012. A new spider was discovered not far away. They named it after Aubie, who was again, in a mascot championship title hunt. The biggest news on campus, perhaps in terms of everyday life, was what was happening at Toomer’s Corner. The oaks were coming out because they’d been poisoned in 2010. In 2013 was the last rolling of the old oaks. (Have you heard, they’re putting in new trees this month.)
