Chad Montrie, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has studied instances of blackface at predominantly white institutions and in the North. The practice depended not just on the failings of an individual, he said, but on a society that viewed African-Americans as inferior.

“One thing that’s been interesting about this [scandal] is it speaks to a gap in the literature; we think of blackface and minstrelsy predominately in the 19th century, but of course it didn’t go away,” he said. “It’s all there, right in a yearbook on the shelf.”

On Tuesday, Richard Horman, president of Eastern Virginia Medical School, apologized for a pattern of “shockingly racist” photos in the school’s yearbooks. The school has hired a team of lawyers to investigate racist culture in its past and present, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Kirt von Daacke, co-chair of UVa’s commission on segregation, said his group is in the midst of a page-by-page review of student publications. So far, he said, he has worked through the first half of the 20th century.