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Notre Dame’s oldest publication has certainly seen its share of historical events. One of my favorite lines from the Dec. 12, 1941 edition of Scholastic is the opening of Ray Donovan’s “Introducing,” which discusses the state of the men’s basketball team: “Defense is the keynote throughout the United States today and the keynote of Coach George Keogan’s fightin’  basketball squad is no different.” After extensively covering the attack on Pearl Harbor that had occurred a mere five days prior in previous pieces (including a column that surveyed students headlined: “What Were You Doing When the War Started?”), the magazine shifts to its regularly scheduled programming. Even during World War II, college was still a bubble of sorts where Hawaii was thousands of miles away, and Notre Dame basketball was in the immediate radius.

By the 1960s, Scholastic had truly developed a voice of its own. In Donald Hynes’ truly artistic piece “Stop this America,” the political slant of the magazine is evident. Hynes tirelessly lists “buzzwords” of American politics and the Vietnam War like “Search and destroy. Young men, 18-26.” In the same edition, Associate Editor Martin McNamara offers his “Monarch Notes,” a satirical dictionary of terms like “self-determination” and “law and order” that not-so-subtly criticize the “government—(formerly),” so-called, as McNamara didn’t see the government at the time acting according to its standard definition.

Perusing these old editions of Scholastic can really help to imagine how students in more or less our same circumstances grappled with the tumult that surrounded them. These are the voices of those who, once upon a time, might’ve lived in the freshman year dorm room of your century-old dorm, hunched over their desks and burning the midnight oil. Notre Dame’s oldest student-run publication offers a rich insight into the lives of those who populated our home 10, 20, even 100 years before we did and the rich legacy of writing and thinking we inherit.