Potpourri celebrates 100 years of documenting NSU history

NSU's yearbook, the Potpourri, is celebrating a century of documenting the university's history. This week, I've invited Bethany Frank to share her reflections on the Potpourri. Bethany is entering her second year as editor of the publication. Here's what she had to say:

I never liked history. I hated sitting through the hour-long class where we discussed the events of the past and the people they involved. I used to sit and wonder why we even bothered to contemplate the who, the when and the why of times past.

Then I became editor-in-chief of the Potpourri. It became my job to create a book that would serve as a historical document for the university.

To quote a past Potpourri, “the success of any yearbook is measured not in its immediate popularity, but in its power to recall in the future the events and people of a given year. It should be a personal record, with the ability to reconstruct all the good times, the big and little incidents that made this particular year outstanding.”

Little did I understand, until creating the centennial edition of the Potpourri and assisting with the planning of the 100th anniversary gala, how true those words were.

An institution's structures are not the only parts of its history worth preserving. The memory of the people--even their hairstyles and fads--should be preserved along with the words that demonstrate their state of thinking in the context of time and place.

A century ago, Twitter and Flickr and Facebook weren't around to track our lives in minute detail. And the university has never kept a stockpile of student photographs and quotes. Someone had to intentionally craft these annals to ensure student life would be remembered. Here are some recent examples of how the Potpourri continues to make itself useful:

1. The theater department looks to Potpourri to study how everyday people did their hair for its stage makeup class.
2. To celebrate the university’s 125th anniversary, the department of Creative Services is creating an anniversary book that will include an anthology of pictures and writing. The Potpourri was one of their primary content sources.
3. When a fraternity realized they had the wrong charter dates, they went to the archives at Watson Library and dug through past Potpourri annuals.

In the yearbook you can find pages of the men who fought in the world wars, the effects of the 2005 hurricanes on the campus and the last photographs of Jim Croce before his sudden death after performing on campus. The Potpourri informs the impressions that future generations will hold about Northwestern. I'm proud to be a part of that tradition.