This is a program of the actual exercises with text of the prayers, addresses and the alma mater. Some issues include the class picture and a register of graduates.

Faced with failing health and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future - and won himself a unique place in American letters. Devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier, Grant's Memoirs traces the trajectory of his extraordinary career - from West Point cadet to general-in-chief of all Union armies. For their directness and clarity, his writings on war are without rival in American literature, and his autobiography deserves a place among the very best in the genre.

Best known for leading the construction of the Panama Canal, George W. Goethals (1858–1928) also played a key role in the decades-long reform that transformed the American military from a frontier constabulary to the expeditionary force of an ascendant world power. George W. Goethals and the Army is at once the first full account of Goethals’s life and military career in ninety years and an in-depth analysis of the process that defined his generation’s military service—the evolution of the US Army during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George W. Goethals was a lieutenant and a captain during the post-Reconstruction years of debate about reform and the future of the army. He was a major when the most significant reforms were created, and he helped with their implementation. As a major general during World War I, he directed a significant part of the army’s adaptation, resolving crises in the mobilization effort caused largely by years of internal resistance to reform. Following Goethals’s career and analyzing reform from his unique perspective, military historian Rory McGovern effectively shifts the focus away from the intent and toward the reality of reform—revealing the importance of the interaction between society, institutional structures, and institutional culture in the process. In this analysis, Goethals’s experiences, military thought, managerial philosophy, conceptions of professionalism, and attitude about training and development provide a framework for understanding the army’s institutional culture and his generation’s relative ambivalence about reform. In its portrait of an officer whose career bridged the distance between military generations, George W. Goethals and the Army also offers a compelling and complex interpretation of American military reform during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era—and valuable insight into the larger dynamics of institutional change that are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

New York Times Bestseller: A “fascinating, funny and tremendously well written” chronicle of daily life at the US Military Academy (Time). In 1998, West Point made an unprecedented offer to Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky: Stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America’s most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars, and training exercises, from arrival through graduation. By telling their stories, he also examines the Academy as a reflection of our society: Are its principles of equality, patriotism, and honor quaint anachronisms or is it still, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, the most “absolutely American” institution? During an eventful four years in West Point’s history, Lipsky witnesses the arrival of TVs and phones in dorm rooms, the end of hazing, and innumerable other shifts in policy and practice. He uncovers previously unreported scandals and poignantly evokes the aftermath of September 11, when cadets must prepare to become officers in wartime. Lipsky also meets some extraordinary people: a former Eagle Scout who struggles with every facet of the program, from classwork to marching; a foul-mouthed party animal who hates the military and came to West Point to play football; a farm-raised kid who seems to be the perfect soldier, despite his affection for the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe; and an exquisitely turned-out female cadet who aspires to “a career in hair and nails” after the Army. The result is, in the words of David Brooks in the New York Times Book Review, “a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have read. . . . How teenagers get turned into leaders is not a simple story, but it is wonderfully told in this book.”