Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
West Point
"The four years we spent together are still one of my most treasured memories.”
Paul A.
In 1817, “Old Pewt’s” rebellious cadets met their master in Sylvanus Thayer
It was June 15, 1817, and up at West Point newly elected President James Monroe, staunch friend of the Military Academy, was in a towering rage. The place was in poor shape, its curriculum had unraveled, examinations were unknown, and discipline was non-existent. The acting superintendent, Captain Alden Partridge, Corps of Engineers, seemed to be running a “Dotheboys Hall” of sorts, where favoritism governed and cadets were being graduated without reference either to academic standing or military ability.
The United States Military Academy turns 200 this year. West Point has grown with the nation—and, more than once, saved it.
The classic image of Coach Lombardi in fact fails to capture his solicitude.
Early in the second month of 1953, I was summoned from study hall at White Plains High School. A college football coach wanted to see me.
He looked just as you always remembered him. There was that trim, dapper stance, the black hair sleek against the head, the signature black mustache. Unmistakably Thomas E. Dewey. The man who couldn’t lose the 1948 presidential election and nonetheless did.
Benedict Arnold never quite understood the cause he served superbly and then betrayed.
A good many Americans have been accused of betraying their country over the past two centuries. Yet only Benedict Arnold’s name has entered the language as a synonym for treason.
The old school is alive with the memory of men like Lee, Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower.
Each year, most of West Point’s three million visitors enter the U.S. Military Academy through the Thayer Gate.
What’s Happened to the Long Gray Line
No monument or institution has more power to stir the patriotic emotions of Americans, or evokes more poignintly the martial virtues of self-sacrifice and discipline, than the United States Military Academy at West Point. In the view of General George S.
The young poet became a legendary plebe in the few painful months he spent at West Point
One morning in June, 1830, Edgar Allan Poe rode the steamer from New York up the Hudson River to West Point. His spirits, like his expectations, were uncharacteristically high.
In a sense, the museum of the United States Military Academy was in existence years before the academy itself was founded.
“My room mate (tent mate, rather) is Dwight Eisenhower of Abilene, Kansas.…” On JuIy 30, 1911, Paul A.
One morning Cadet Johnson Whittaker was found battered and bleeding, trussed to his barracks bed. Who had done it, and why?
West Point, April 7, 1880. At reveille—6 A.M. —it was discovered that Cadet Johnson Chesnut Whittaker was not in formation. This caused a slight stir of interest, for Whittaker was an unusual cadet.
On the eve of the Civil War differing loyalties sent some West Pointers north, others south, but their academy friendship survived the conflict.
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