Ancestry.com is honoring Veteran’s Day by having a free access weekend (Nov. 11-14), so here’s your chance to save some money (a TOCWOC specialty). You don’t even have to be a veteran (but you do have to give them your email address).
Tarheel AP history teacher Betsy Newmark takes a look at some of what’s available—the West Point application letters of some future Civil War generals.
Ohio Congressman John Bingham, in his 1856 nomination letter for Custer, described the then-17-year-old as being a shade under 5-foot-10, with “no deformity.” Custer, Bingham wrote, “reads well, spells correctly, writes a fair and legible hand, able to perform with facility and accuracy the ground rules of arithmetic …”
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