This scrapbook,” Barbara Lou ’25 writes, “is a collection of moments—mundane, meaningful, and everything in between—that together paint a picture of my life as a Cornell student.”
Created as the final project for a popular course on Big Red history, Lou’s scrapbook includes ephemera like ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, and event flyers; it also contains screenshots of late-night texts, Lou writes, “because they made me laugh when I needed it most.”
Lou submitted the 18-page volume via PDF in May 2025 for the First American University, a one-credit American Studies course on Cornell history and lore taught by Corey Ryan Earle ’07.
She was among the nearly 100 classmates who opted to create scrapbooks—either physical or digital—chronicling their experiences on the Hill for future generations as their capstone project for the course.
And tomorrow’s students and scholars will indeed have access to them: once graded, the scrapbooks become part of the University Archives.
“Compared to a century ago, scrapbooking is a dying art,” Earle observes.
“Today’s students capture their experiences online, through social media—but will that be accessible in 100 years? This project provides a way to preserve the history of our present day, so future historians know what Cornell was like in 2025.”
The University Archives already holds an impressive collection of student scrapbooks dating from the medium’s golden age more than a century ago.
