West Point: The First 200 Years

West Point famously graduated generals like Grant and MacArthur, but it's perhaps less well known that James Whistler also matriculated (he was a poor student who dropped out, but not before drawing some humorous sketches of cadet life), or that one of the first cadets to graduate, Simon M. Levy, was Jewish. These and other trivia are collected in West Point: The First 200 Years, a glossy photo book celebrating the academy's distinguished history. John Grant, producer of a PBS special to which the book is a companion, and writers James Lynch and Ronald Bailey have put together a capsule history illustrated with copious photographs of the campus, cadets and renowned alumni.