Marissa Krein is a graduate student at the School of Information Science. She is currently completing a practicum at the Student Life and Culture Archives.
The Student Life and Culture Archives recently received four scrapbooks from the family of Miriam Backs chronicling her years as a student at the University of Illinois.
Miriam Carolyn Backs was born on November 30, 1928, in Nashville, Illinois. Her father, Gus H. Backs, was the owner and manager of Backs Department Store and her mother was a homemaker. Miriam grew up in the small southern Illinois town and graduated from Nashville Community High School in 1946. She chose to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and enrolled in the freshmen class of 1946. Mirroring her family’s business background, she majored in accounting at the College of Commerce and Business Administration (now College of Business). Her scrapbooks chronicle her four years at the university and are full of memorabilia highlighting her involvement on campus and her active social life as well as her various summer vacations through the South and Midwest. Continue reading “New in the Archives: The Scrapbooks of Miriam Backs”