Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
The Class of 1846 by John Waugh - $1.99
. . . .
|
Great post. It looks like a great book. I was thinking seriously of posting it myself, until I saw that you had already posted it.
I might take a little exception to something that the book description said. It said, "No single group of men at West Point--or possibly any academy--has been so indelibly written into history as the class of 1846."
Yeah, that statement has some publishers' hype. And it may have been born of more than a little Americentrism. How many people outside of the U.S. would recognize
any of the names that the book description gave--"Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, George B. McClellan, Ambrose Powell Hill, Darius Nash Couch, George Edward Pickett, Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox, and George Stoneman"?
Most, if not all, of those men gained recognition or fame because of their service in the American Civil War. And, I wonder if those men--great though they were--still have the name recognition that they do in the U.S. today primarily because of the endless fascination that many Americans have today for the American Civil War.
Compare that to the West Point class of 1915. Many of those who graduated from there that year attained
worldwide fame. Ever heard of Omar Bradley, a high-ranking, highly-successful general in Europe in World War II? How about Dwight Eisenhower, who not only became the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, but then went on to become
President of the United States? Talk about "indelibly written into history"! Those are just two of the
many graduates of that class who obtained lasting, worldwide fame.
That class was so stellar that historians and others call it "The Class the Stars Fell On." I have to agree with them and say that the greatest class of West Point was that of 1915. The class of 1846 was perhaps the
second greatest.