Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my undergraduate alma mater. This is the newest book in my Glomerata collection, the 1898, only the second volume they’d ever published.
Check out the 1898 cover, when William McKinley was still the president and Joseph Forney Johnston was the governor. Johnston was wounded at Chickamauga, Spottsylvania, New Market and Petersburg during the war before coming home, getting a law degree and becoming a captain of industry and then the governor. You never hear his name anymore, good or bad.
Anyway. The institution was still called Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama before being re-named the next year as Alabama Polytechnic Institute. William Leroy Broun, who fought at Richmond and was entering his second appointment in the position. Broun is considered one of the more influential presidents in the university’s history, something of an odd distinction given the continually repeating history, but nevertheless. One of the engineering buildings is named in his honor, the second building on campus to carry his name. The modern Broun Hall houses the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Alabama Microelectronics Science and Technology Center, and the Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics.
Things were changing at Auburn. These were important times on the Plains:
In 1887, the United States Congress passed the Hatch Act, which appropriated $15,000 per year to each state for the establishment of an agricultural experiment station in connection with the land-grant college. Meanwhile, the legislature had appropriated $12,500 for the college, beyond the funds generated through the fertilizer tax, for use during the coming two years. In the summer of 1888, the president reported that the Department of Mechanic Arts had been well-equipped through the earlier state appropriation and urged the officers of the experiment station to begin a series of farmer’s institutes, in addition to the bulletins they already produced. In 1890, Broun reported that the college’s enrollment had doubled in the past five years, which he attributed to the board’s efforts “to establish in conformity with the legislation creating the institution, a school of science and its applications adapted to the wants and necessities of the growth of the state.”
Electrons had just been discovered, the same could be said of what transmitted electrons. And speaking of transmissions, Guglielmo Marconi had just sent the first ever wireless communication over open sea. Five new chemical elements were discovered in 1898: neon, krypton, xenon, polonium and radium. Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the Bessemer process for steelmaking which was so important to this region, died. Isidor Isaac Rabi. the American who invented the atomic beam magnetic resonance method of measuring magnetic properties of atoms and molecules, was born. The first commercial cars were being made in America, though most people were only reading about them in the paper, at best. Dracula was becoming a hit. The USS Maine sank and the Spanish American War was about to begin. Times were changing everywhere, even when the people living in them didn’t know it.
Anyway, you can walk through all the covers if you start here. For a detailed look at selected volumes, you might enjoy this link. Here is the university’s official collection.
