Reminisce Online with Digitized Yamacraw Yearbooks

The OU women held their own on the rifle range! The Yamacraw, 1962-1963

Did you know that Oglethorpe once had an all-women’s rifle team?  Or that OU’s athletics department once included a wrestling team—and a football team? Or that Oglethorpe’s first yearbook was produced in 1920?

Thanks to a grant-funded project through LYRASIS, the Philip Weltner Library now features a number of new digital collections online, including almost the entire set of Yamacraw yearbooks dating back 90 years. According OU reference librarian Laura Masce, returning alumni often are interested in tracking down their old yearbooks.  Now everyone can look back on their glory days from the comfort of their own computers.

The other new collections now available online include OU’s alumni newsletter, Flying Petrels, from 1956 to 1971, two years of the Stormy Petrel newspaper from the early 1990s, and all issues of the Carillon alumni magazine.

These newly digitized materials add to the library’s existing online collections that includes early photographs of the Oglethorpe’s buildings and grounds (including original campus construction), campus life in the 1950s, and athletics images (including the 1920s football team that beat Georgia Tech!)

According to Masce, the library will continue to expand its digital collections to document and “celebrate the history of our university.”

What’s a Yamacraw? Oglethorpe serves as a “living memorial” to the founder of Georgia and borrows many references to the life and legend of its namesake, General James Oglethorpe. The school yearbook is named after the Native American tribe in Georgia that befriended Oglethorpe.

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