History
A larger variant of the skullcap, the beanie was a working hat associated with blue collar laborers, welders, mechanics, and other tradesmen who needed to keep their hair back but for whom a brim would be an unnecessary obstruction. Beanies do sometimes have a very small brim, less than an inch deep, around the brow front. The baseball cap evolved from this kind of beanie, with the addition of a brim to block the sun.
By the mid 1940s, beanies fell out of popularity as a hat in favor of cotton visored caps like the baseball cap although, in the 1950s and possibly beyond, they were worn by college freshmen and various fraternities as a form of mild hazing. Lehigh University required freshmen to wear beanies, or "dinks," and other colleges including Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, Rutgers, Westminster College and others may have had similar practices. Benedictine College, in Atchison, KS, still carries this tradition for the first week of a freshman's classes. It is the only college in the country to maintain this tradition.
Read more about this topic: Beanie (North America)
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