Over the course of six years, beginning in 2009, the creators (of which I am one) of The Heights: An Illustrated History of Boston College, 1863–2013 examined and disputed and re-disputed over an estimated 10,000 images of Boston College preserved in a score of institutional archives as well as family and personal collections. When the dust settled, we had 535 images for publication—setting the others aside not because they weren’t beautiful or instructive or moving or all those things together, but because they did not feed the river of history as it cut its way through 150 years of Boston College life. And our mission was to follow the river.

Foremost among images I wish we could have published are these that follow.

From the winter of 1940: Framed by bare linden trees and the backdrop of St. Mary’s Hall, a group of about 20 students, nearly all in letter jackets and cleats, caps in their hands, attend to a priest who is speaking from the top of the Bapst Library front steps. The caption reads: “Baseball team prays for peace.”

From May 1921: University President William Devlin, SJ, all in black, obligingly standing with one hand resting on the shank of a miniature pony on which sits a straight-backed, imperious “Miss Mary Stuart,” perhaps six years old, who is the daughter of a significant donor to the College.

From 1921, and the same capital campaign: A volunteer solicitor’s “Daily Envelope Report” imprinted with the instruction: “Sign your own [pledge] card first, it’s better to be ‘one of ’em.'”

From 1960: The 25th reunion gathering of the Class of 1935, with adults filling a 30-foot wide area on the four entry stairs to More Hall. Below them, sitting and standing five deep across a 60-foot swath of sidewalk, are their Baby Boomers—toddlers to late teens—the girls in summer dresses and the boys in suits, white shirts, and ties.

From the 1970s: A Jesuit strides past a row of cheerleaders in short skirts, smiling, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him.

From the 1890s: A page from a scrapbook to which are affixed photographs of Boston College students arranged in groups according to the Boston neighborhoods from which they commuted, with handwritten notations beside each image, such as “All from Roxbury.”

Any photo of the thick-spectacled, wide-shouldered, and brilliant John A. (Jack) Ryder, who was track coach from 1919 to 1952 and under whom Boston College runners and teams were a consistently dominant force in the Northeast.

From 1918 or 1919: While four men in dark suits and straw hats look on, two freshmen stand atop a white end-zone cross-post on Alumni Field; below them about 50 of their classmates madly and incoherently wrestle with each other. The unsatisfying caption tells us, “Freshman rush was a tradition during the early 20th century.”

From the early 1960s: Librarian Brendan Connolly, SJ, standing in the “cage” in Bapst Library that held books appearing on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to which, until 1966, students had access only with a permission slip signed by Boston College’s president.

From 1928: Page 45 from “Volume I” of Ethics Notes, by the legendarily cantankerous faculty member Jones J. Corrigan, SJ, which begins “The Norms of Morality of Utilitarianism under its fourfold form (1) Egoistic Hedonism, (2) Universalistic Hedonism, (3) Ethical Evolution and (4) Negative Eudaemonism, are false.”

From 1959: 400 dress-uniformed members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, their hands clasped before them, kneel on a polished tile floor in McHugh Forum during a Field Mass.

From the late 1950s or early 1960s: Three Boston College men with close-cropped hair determinedly smile for the camera while standing on the tarmac beside an Alitalia passenger plane and miming the handing of a poster-sized placard to two chic Alitalia stewardesses (smiling warily). Written on the placard: “To his Holiness Pope John XXIII . . . from the students of Boston College: Masses—3,353; Rosaries—2,755; Communions—2,993; Visits to the Blessed Sacrament—2,830; Corporal Works of Mercy—2,323.”

From the 1920s: One of the two known photos of Patrick McHugh, SJ, dean of studies from 1920 until his death in 1935, whom I and Seth Meehan, Ph.D.’14 (my co-author), believe to have been the faculty member and Jesuit most universally beloved by students and alumni—”a father to all BC men,” said one student.

From the early 1980s: A photo of the gang of young chemistry faculty who determined, without clearance from Boston College, that they would make the University a place where serious science was conducted.

The next illustrated history is likely to appear in 2038 or 2063. My introduction to the images that did appear in the current history begins here.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum