Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 5,000 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Strong Hall construction, 1917. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 0/22/87 1917 Prints: Campus: Buildings: Strong Hall (Photos).
Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Strong Hall construction, 1918. Note that the photograph
was taken almost exactly ninety-seven years ago.
University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 0/22/87 1918 Negatives:
Campus: Buildings: Strong Hall (Photos). Click image to enlarge.

Strong Hall construction, 1918. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 0/22/87 1918 Prints: Campus: Buildings: Strong Hall (Photos).
Click on image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 5,000 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Three women sitting under Potter Bridge, 1920s. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 0/24/1 Potter Bridge 1920s Prints:
Campus: Areas and Objects (Photos). Click image to enlarge.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 5,000 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Students walking in the rain along Jayhawk Boulevard in front of Wescoe Hall, 1975-1976.
University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 0/24/1 Rain 1975/1976 Prints:
Campus: Areas and Objects (Photos). Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 5,000 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Monday is Memorial Day, so this week we’re sharing selected pages from the 1919 Jayhawker yearbook. The volume, the first published after the end of World War I, was called The Peace Edition and dedicated to “the memory of the Men of the University of Kansas who willingly served their government in its great crisis, even to the supreme sacrifice of life itself.” The yearbook included tributes to twenty-seven of the approximately 130 KU students and alumni who died in World War I. (This number included two female students, Lucy McLinden and Fay Friedberg, who died from influenza.) KU’s stadium and student union memorialize these men and women.

Selected pages from the 1919 Jayhawker yearbook.
William T. Fitzsimons was also the first United States Army officer killed in World War I.
More information about him is also available at the KU History website.
University Archives. Call Number: LD 2697 .J3 1919. Click images to enlarge.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 5,000 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Congratulations to the Class of 2015! We wish each of you all the best in your future endeavors.

KU graduates walking down Mount Oread to Memorial Stadium, 1950s.
University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 0/17 1950s Negatives:
University General: Commencement (Photos). Click images to enlarge.

Author and former KU chemistry professor Robert Taft provides a wonderful description of the KU graduation tradition shown in these pictures in Across the Years on Mount Oread (1941):

For the graduate of recent years and for many spectators, no Commencement sight has been more impressive than the long line of graduates marching down over Mount Oread from Strong Hall to the Stadium in the glory of a June evening [or, now, a May afternoon] for the Baccalaureate and the Commencement exercises. This striking feature was initiated in the Commencement of 1924, and has – weather permitting – been carried out annually since that day. Many and bitter have been the tears of the girl graduates who have been denied this privilege by the vagaries of the weather, and even the prosaic and matter-of-fact males must have felt some twinge of regret, when the same favor was withheld (104).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants