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.

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.)

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 1904 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1910 Glom.

It always amuses me to realize we’re looking at a book that was leafed through more than a century ago.

In 1910 William Howard Taft had settled into the White House and Teddy Roosevelt was just beginning to wonder what his old friend Taft was doing. Johnny Mercer was born in late 1909 and Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize. That set the stage for a swiftly moving 1910. The Ottomans were losing their grip on empire. The first horror movie, Frankenstein, was released. Halley’s Comet appeared for the first time in 76 years and the first dirigible flew in Germany. The students would have read the news of Mark Twain’s death, but they couldn’t know that Sarah and Harry’s new baby in New York City, Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, would move generations of music lovers. Years later they’d settle in, though, and listen to Artie Shaw playing over their new radio.

There were 92 million people in the U.S. in 1910, an increase of 21 percent over the 1900 census data — a decennial rate, according to Wikipedia, which hasn’t been matched since. There were 2.1 million people in Alabama. Braxton Bragg Comer was the governor. He reformed the railroad system, child labor laws, boosted schools for white students and helped move the needle on state literacy. He did little for black Alabamians. He presided over a big local and state push toward Prohibition. This was a period when it was not illegal to possess alcohol in Alabama, but you could not purchase it.

The main agricultural building at Auburn is named after Comer. It was built in 1909, and rebuilt after a fire in the 1920s. That building is said to have housed more departments and academic units over the years than any other building on campus except Samford Hall. It got its start in a tough time for Auburn, university officials had just beaten back an effort to move the university to Birmingham. President Thach, who has been discussed in this space before, was successful in securing much needed money for the university, and that irked the people across the state at Alabama. It got nasty. And you thought that rivalry was all about football …

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 1924 edition. If you click this book’s cover you can see the 1920 Glom.

It was only 94 years ago when this 1920 book was landing in students’ hands for the first time. Teddy Roosevelt was gone. Woodrow Wilson, himself ill, stepped down. World War I was still very much on the top of minds, even as the wartime economic boom evaporated. Treaties, the League of Nations, and non-intervention policies were the big national topics. The year previous there were widespread streaks in meatpacking and steel. Race riots in major cities and anarchist attacks in New York. Warren G. Harding would that fall be elected president. Thomas Kilby, a Tennessee boy, was a railroad agent and successful businessman who had made his living in Anniston. He became mayor, a state legislator and then the lieutenant governor. In 1919 he took the oath as governor of Alabama. The next year he ended the deadly 1920 coal strike. No one ever talks about that. It is easy to see why.

Numismatic trivia: Kilby was put on the Alabama centennial half dollar in 1921, making him the first living person to appear on a U.S. coin.

Across the state, lawmakers and the University of Alabama were playing political games that would cripple Auburn for years. It hampered and highlighted the administration of the university president, Charles C. Thach. He served as president from 1902 until 1919. When he started the university’s only income was from a fertilizer tax. An illuminating oil tax and a barely upheld contribution from the state legislature helped. A little. Also, in the teens:

Not long after the Carnegie Foundation report appeared in print, an employee of the Montgomery Advertiser forwarded to API a draft article President Denny had submitted for publication in that paper. The informant believed the article contained thinly veiled attacks on API. Among other things, Denny wrote that the “choice young men and women” of the state wanted to attend the University of Alabama because it was known throughout the country, not within the “narrow confines” of a single state. He charged that some of the “so-called colleges” had been accepting students without adequate high school preparation. Shortly thereafter, API began to require the standard fourteen units of high school work for unconditional admission. Under President Thach’s calm and cool leadership, Alabama Polytechnic Institute weathered the storm of criticism with dignity.

By the time of the 1915 quadrennial session, API still had not received the $200,000 approved by the legislature in 1911.

And that’s the way it went for Thach. When he stepped down for health reasons at the end of 1919, and died the next year, that state money was apparently still out there, somewhere. It was all just the opening act for what would be a tumultuous decade in the 1920s.

In the fall of 1919 the first Army transcontinental motor convoy, an expedition across America, reached San Francisco. A young unknown lieutenant colonel, Dwight Eisenhower, was a part of the 3,251 mile, 62 days journey. Chicago had its Black Sox scandal. The Spanish flu petered out. Andy Rooney, Jackie Robinson, Pete Seeger and George Wallace were born in 1919. In the first half of 1920 API students heard about the New York Yankees acquiring that guy, Babe Ruth from Boston. Prohibition began. That June, The United States Post Office Department ruled that children could not be sent via parcel post. Apparently that happened, and it is important that you know it. James Doohan and Jack Webb were born in 1920, as was Karol Józef Wojtyła, who you would know as Pope John Paul II.

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.