Carleton’s Curious Collections: Putting the T in History

In addition to preserving official college history, Carleton Archives serves another role: as makeshift College museum. Alongside inventory like a bobblehead toy of past president Stephen Lewis and green felt beanies once worn by first-years are three boxes of T-shirts.

Dating to 1950, the 124 items inside document social movements (a 1980 campus food service workers strike), mark key events (the NCAA’s first, and only, metric football game, a 1977 Carleton-St. Olaf game cheered on, as one shirt reports, by “Cheer Liters”), or celebrate departmental spirit.

Most prevalent in this last category are oft-punny shirts from the geology department (a sample: “Talus that you lavus”). “They have little traditional informational value,” says archivist Eric Hillemann, but they do capture something—beyond trace DNA from students of yore—meaningful: an informal social history of campus life over the years.