According to Wikipedia, the most famous students who would have been there in 1828 were Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis. Also, the valedictorian from 1929, Charles Mason, was the student with the highest scores ever at the academy. He beat out Lee for valedictorian, with Lee holding the record as the second highest scoring student in academy history. (The third highest scoring student ever was Douglas MacArthur 75 years later.)
I knew that U. S. Grant was also at West Point, but I looked it up and he was there in 1839. A good many of the generals on opposite sides of the Civil War served together in prior conflicts.
I wonder if there’s a book out there that traces their lives from West Point to Appomattox. I found a book recently that did a similar thing with Wellington (following him through his India campaigns) and Napoleon (starting in Egypt.) Although I don’t think they ever met before Waterloo. (Or even if they personally met at all, actually.)
There is a book that tracks both of these men through to Appomattox.
The Generals - Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee ; Authors Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson (1989) ; ISBN 0-394-75985-0
My cousin "loaned" me this book years ago. One day I will return it.
It does what you ask - following each man's life from childhood through the surrender at Appomattox and includes a nice bibliography, chapter notes, etc. I found it a fascinating read that offered up so many details one would not expect. For any lover of history this is a great book contrasting two of the most important people in that conflict.
Since we’re off down a rabbit hole anyway, my favourite meetings of rival generals are those between Scipio Africanus and Hannibal. Once before the battle of Zama, and again years later in Ephesus when their military careers were behind them. I think one account is in Polybius and the other Livy.
Not the book you're asking for, but I want to plug Grant's autobiography. It has a sort of "I've already been a general and president so now I can tell you about embarrassing things I did as a kid" charm that is an interesting contrast to typical biographies.
Grant, a paper millionaire prior, discovered that he had lost his entire fortune in a Ponzi Scheme. Realizing that he needed to find a way to pay back the loan and support his family, Grant turned to writing. Mark Twain convinced Grant to sign a contract with his nephew’s new publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, to write his memoirs. To sweeten the deal, Twain offered Grant a seventy percent royalty from the profits. The need to write the memoirs quickly became more urgent when Grant was diagnosed with inoperable throat cancer that worsened with time. Grant worked vigorously throughout early 1885 to write the memoirs. He and his wife Julia also relocated in June to a friend's cottage in upstate New York at Mount McGregor to continue writing in a peaceful setting. Grant spent upwards of five to seven hours a day working on the book, aided by his son Frederick and other assistants who checked facts. His servant Harrison Terrell and Doctor John Hancock Douglas also played a crucial role by tending to Grant’s medical needs and provided comfort during moments of great pain. Grant finished the Memoirs three days before his death on July 23, 1885. When "The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant" were published later that year, they became an instant best-seller. The first paycheck to his widow, Julia Dent Grant, was for $200,000, providing long-term financial stability to the Grant family.
It's pretty surprising how strongly top performance at that institution seems to correlate with accomplishments later in life that are mostly unrelated to academic prowess. That isn't true for regular universities, I think.
I thought so too, and I went to one of the three National Service Academies, so I was taught about a lot of these people directly. Many of the modern top generals were some of the lowest-ranked graduates, and generally took the easiest majors, mostly Political Science. The bottom-ranked leader phenomenon starts with the leaders selected by the cadets themselves, and continues to the top of the ranks. So why was it different back then? There was a stronger emphasis on military science, but they also prided themselves on outperforming Harvard in whatever colleges used to compare each other, so it wasn’t the only focus.
The obvious answer is pretty simple: graduation order determined time-in-rank seniority, so they were considered for promotion before anyone else, and this both continues and compounds throughout their career.
Is there an actual correlation to military performance? Probably, and probably slightly more so for the academy than other schools, because of the way that subjects are taught. I later went to several other name-recognizable universities, and there are large differences in the pace and depth of what is taught and tested, with the academy having a much greater pace over much more material at a much lighter depth, so it’s kind of like testing your ability to take in a lot of information very quickly and react to it, rather than master a domain of knowledge and creatively expand upon it.
There is also a social effect of named leaders to gain support among a cohort, especially in ‘minority’ populations, which are formed by commissioning source in the military officer corps. For example, Westmoreland was “first rat” at The Citadel, which has a much lower admission standard than West Point, but it was a brutal program with fierce advocacy among graduates.
I'm not sure what the line about Westmoreland and the Citadel and minority populations means. William Westmoreland, the US Army general who lead MACV during the critical years of the Vietnam War, spent his first year of college at the Citadel, but then transferred to USMA (transfers into military academies was quite common at the time), where he ended up as First Captain (basically head of Cadets, not top in class rank but the commander of the Brigade of Cadets).
One of his classmates in the class of 1936, Benjamin O. Davis Jr, was the first African-American to attend West Point in nearly 50 years, and would go on to lead the Tuskegee Airmen into battle. Davis suffered from a set of social isolation during his entire four years at USMA, never had a roommate, no one talked to him during meals, no one talked to him outside of class, he was not invited to dances or social events, etc. trying to drive him out of the Academy and return it to the all-White way it had been. Apparently Westmoreland wasn't one of the ring-leaders of this ostracism, but as First Captain it sure as hell was his job to stop it, and he failed to do so.
This started a pattern for Westmoreland, of being wrong about things but getting promoted anyway, that continued for the rest of his life. _Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam_ by US Army in Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorely, is appropriately scathing of the man and his failures.
Firstly, it’s a military school and we’re talking about military achievement so the things are hardly unrelated. Secondly, it would be more surprising if there were low or no correlation between their school and military achievements.
If Lee hadn't gone to West Point and rubbed shoulders with all the right people, would he have gotten the job that made him famous? There were probably rank and file soldiers blown away in opening volleys who had more raw potential as military strategists than Lee, but were never given the opportunity because they didn't have the money, prestigious degree, and political connections.
Software has always been a special case because despite some naysayers, it is quite meritocratic compared to other fields. Your degree might boost your ability to get an interview, but in a good technical interview, the good coder without a degree is generally going to stand out from a bad coder even if they have a degree from a prestigious university.
I expect it to be an upside down parabola. From my experience, top performers in school were either very smart or worked very hard, or both - two skills necessary for software engineering achievement.
The other side of the parabola are smart kids who worked hard on things they found interesting, which just happened to not be school
The very smart and very hard working are of course the shoe-ins. And then it's either the very smart and lazy or moderately smart and very hard working who are next most likely.
But the moderately smart and moderately hard working just get lost in the crowd.
I would definitely expect a high correlation between the top software engineering school and software engineering accomplishments, because there's a strong bias. If you want to achieve something in software engineering, most likely you'd want to go to a top school. I think it's the same for West point.
I wouldn't think so. They might get their first choice of specialty within the army as a young second lieutenant, and get some compounding advantages from that. But twenty years later, when you're up for promotion to general, aren't they going to look at your achievements as a colonel rather than wave you through on your long-ago test scores?
Promotion to general is very much a political effort as well as job performance today, but even more so back then.
Being at the top of your cohort from the beginning has a number of advantages. Your name is known from the very start. Big things are expected and big opportunities are presented. There is probably a very strong personal commitment to a military career by those bothering to achieve top scores, and not being a career captain, but aiming for colonel or above.
Being the top of the class also puts a person on a track that is even promotable to the very top. A 2nd lieutenant supply officer just isn't on the same trajectory as a high profile infantry officer commanding a forwardly deploy combat unit.
1. West Point does a very good job of selecting for and rewarding the same traits that lead to career success.
2. The most successful military leaders (especially in wartime) become famous, far beyond the most successful doctors or lawyers. 12 of them became US Presidents, but this has been true since ancient times. The guy with the best grades in Harvard Medical School might have a fantastically successful career, but you haven't heard of him.
Is that still true though? A handful of leaders from WWII are well known but the only American leader I know from recent times is general Schwarzkopf with his video games.
Wars in more recent times are less impactful on the American populace. The last war that had a significant influence on the average person was Vietnam, and even then, we almost had John McCain, Al Gore, and Wesley Clark as presidents, although none were particularly high-ranking in the military.
After being West Point valedictorian, Wes Clark was NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe – can’t get too much higher than that. But yes, McCain was “only” a Captain, and Gore served for a year or so.
That's true, my mistake, and I guess he was in charge during Kosovo. But I'm not sure he would really count as being a "military leader" in the same way that Washington, Grant, or Eisenhower were.
Yeah, he was the golden boy until he wasn’t. There could have been another universe where he parlayed into a political career, but I think the fact that Iraq is still fundamentally a mess cut against him because his big success was still sort of just an asterisk. He would have had to run in like 2012 on the platform that Obama was ruining his victory in Iraq.
It is less true in modern times, but the wars that have been waged have been inconsequential for the average American. It will probably matter again someday.
Well hopefully not. I'd be really happy if we could deprecate the military and its spending altogether because the world is safe enough. War is terrible for everyone even the winner. And there is no glory in conquest.
I'm surprised that they are not waiting till 2028 to open it. Would be and great PR.
I wonder if the inconclusive X-rays indicated underwhelming contents.
A difficult to x-ray lead box sounds like the ideal use case for neutron imaging.
Finding a time capsule and then opening it at 195 years rather than 200 years seems very much like you just don’t want someone five years from now to get to do it instead of you.
I don’t know a lot about Westpoint but my hunch is if someone from Westpoint wrote “don’t open this for 200 years” on the time capsule then it won’t be opened until exactly 200 years has passed.
Most people, probably including those who created the time capsules, like nice 'round' numbers for some reason. It's why we have terms like centenial, bicentenial, etc.
People bury time capsules in the hopes that it is unearthed 50 or 100 or 200 or 1000 years
You'll notice that most time capsules are buried with the expectation that it is unearthed on non-arbitrary dates.
The sealed lead time capsule measuring about one square foot was discovered in the Thaddeus Kosciuszko monument's base during recent renovations. Academy officials determined the capsule was placed in the base of the Kosciuszko monument 26 years after the academy’s founding by cadets in 1828.
This sentence seems to imply that the capsule is from 1854, 26 years after 1828.
The article also references the class of 1822, and the Roman numerals in the Academy's arms in the upper left of the page read 1802. With these three things taken together, it's hard to be sympathetic to the "founded in 1828" inferences.
English is not my native language, so I initially misread it as being founded by cadets in 1828. That seemed strange to me, so I had to read the sentence again before I figured out the actual meaning.
English is my native language, and your reading is correct. It's badly written. English is not a high-context language; you shouldn't have to know that the university was not founded by cadets for the sentence to be clear, so the "26 years after the academy's founding" part should have been a subordinate clause, separated by a comma.
Just to add to this:
It's my observation as a layman (not a linguist) that over the past half-century, commas seem to have gone out of vogue for some strange reason, so a lot of contemporary English writing has become much more difficult to parse as a result. This line we're discussing here is a great example of this.
> The capsule was found in 2023 when the monument's base was removed from the site.
This is a reminder of how quickly things are forgotten. In this case, the presence of the time capsule was forgotten within the span of less than 200 years. I suppose those who placed the capsule could have done so under complete secrecy. More likely a few people knew about it, but that knowledge just disappeared with those who knew it.
The school that I went to buried a time capsule that was supposed to be opened in 25 years. When that time came around, some of the students present at the burial contacted the school the enquire about the opening, but no one at the school knew anything about it (the staff had all changed within that time) and the burial spot had been built on.
Isn't that the point of time capsules? The quicker we forget about them, the better. Then some event happens and they surface to everybody's excitement.
Lesson learned here is to make sure to add things which won't decay :)
I like to think that, unless there's a plan to open it, forgetting about it is just fine, if not the intent of a time capsule. Makes opening it up all the more exciting.
Putting it in the base of a statue was also smart, instead of burying it somewhere or encasing it in the foundations. Somewhere public and obvious, but still hidden.
Yeah you can certainly make the case for Humanity being at least 100,000 years old, and even make a case for it being 500,000 years old or even a million years old.
Homo was controlling fire probably half a million years ago and crafting stone tools 2 million years ago or more
depends on what you define as humanity. Primordial ooze? Bipetal animals? The current cut of ape? civilization? Of course the + is doing a lot of work because it's a fuzzy concept and doesn't change the fact that "quick" is just as relative.
The name "time capsule" and the formality around them is a 20th century thing, but people have been hiding messages to future people for as long as we've had the ability to do so.
I don't believe there was any intention to deliver a message to future humans (except maybe "don't rob this grave or else") when they were built. Or at least we don't have any evidence for that.
I find quite an opposite message to that, more "look how impressive this monument is, it cannot be destroyed and will serve as a time capsule to us whenever you encounter it". Great Pyramid isn't a tomb.
"The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid and served as the tomb of pharaoh Khufu, who ruled during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom."
Yet no body of Khufu or anyone else was found inside it. It's been attributed to Khufu, and there's decent reasons to doubt that attribution (really not getting all Graham Hancock here, but there's nevertheless little to indicate it's a tomb. Yeah other pyramids are tombs with sarcophagi but the Great one is absent of that - no body, no tomb.)
Depends on how you think of it. It was built to last forever, a monument to the person interred; a message to the future saying "I existed". Didn't they also contain the interred people's history and achievements?
Maybe not a time capsule in that sense of the word, but still.
May be worth analyzing that dirt to determine where it came from. I'm reminded of sports fans who will collect dirt from the field (or melted ice for hockey) as a memento of a game.
Or research the library in case someone wrote about the time capsule.
Could have been symbolically empty, or it could have been the box itself had significance. Or it could have been that there was a valuable item but it was taken by whoever sealed it, knowing there would be no risk of getting caught
The frog pops out, says "please wait while a required software update is installed", freezes for 7 minutes, climbs back in the box, and then pops out again and sings "hello my baby" etc.
Or was it written much earlier and someone didn't want to wait until 2024 to open their time capsule, thus introducing the song to the world much earlier than expected.
Every time capsule I've seen online ever, seems to have remarkably hokey artefacts in it. Random things which it's hard to judge relevance of with modern eyes.
I wonder how many of them yield eg low background radiation sources, air samples insulated from contemporary changes, tree ring data with specific times, previously unseen sources of confirmatory data about other things, extractable DNA, colour swatches preserved from UV light, whisky bottle residue..
The Westinghouse Time Capsule, buried below Flushing Meadow in New York in 1939, is rather banal. That was a elaborate project. It's supposed to stay buried for 5,000 years The contents should survive; the outer shell is a very durable alloy, and the contents are sealed in glass in nitrogen. But the site will probably be under water in this century.
To keep track of where it is, thousands of copies of "The Book of Record" were distributed to libraries around the world. If you want a copy, it's about $10 on eBay.
I was told a story about a time capsule in Covina, CA, USA same result nothing found, because hermetic sealing wasn't figured out until a year after that one was buried.
This clearly shows the capsule was breached and 200 years of water, air or moisture will ruin anything organic. Worst case it was human ashes, I doubt something like that, Kosciuszko died in Switzerland, but it would be interesting to do some mineral x-ray gun atomic analysis on the remainders to see paper? cloth? only silt?.
The Westinghouse one was done about as well as you can preserve organic things like paper and cloth.
Also reminds me of the TMBG song "By the time you get this" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCOajqLycI
The purpose of a time capsule isn't scientific discovery. It's simply one generation of students showing a slice of their everyday life to another. "Hokey artifacts" is the entire point.
I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century people did or could have come up with.
When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
An example of this is an air collection, which operates in Tasmania. They fill diving canisters with air samples, and mark them by date and climate/conditions.
They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air, at that place and time.
Future science is going to have a field day.
A couple of well established air samples from when scientific glass blowing first happened have also been found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of known provenance.
At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000 years ago understood quite well, and didn’t have much worse of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they yield are the vast majority of improved understandings. There’s a lot otherwise that maybe we haven’t made much progress on.
Well, human psychology is a good example in my opinion. Technology has allowed us to make progress here, but even philosophies from this era still hold incredible insight that many, many modern humans may never acquire in their own lives.
Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.
The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.
> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.
> Where baby animals come from.
There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
> How to make beer and bread.
Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
For the purposes of planning, I think they understood them about as well as most modern people do. Specialists now understand them a damn sight better but in practical terms I suspect a brewer in Egypt knew when the beer was ready about as well as some hipster with his alcohol meter, and the Egyptian shepard knew when sheep fell pregnant, and how to tell which ones had been tupped by the Ram.
Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.
You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
Literally none of these are even remotely close to “examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us”.
Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.
Nothing. It was all magic and gods. They lived as long as their rotting teeth allowed. And discovering that you can observe things and have power over your own mind isn't exactly huge these days.
It’s one thing to discover it or have a cursory understanding of it, but it’s another thing to essentially invent CBT millennia before it was formalized by modern humans.
If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.
I was a fan of Marcus Aurelius as a teen, and I grew out of it. But that doesn't give me the right to call people ignorant in some online forum. Your opinions are your own and so are mine.
The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of cross-cultural communication. Until very recently, ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th century, questions like "What are people in the future going to look for when trying to understand this?" could have only been answered by random guessing, if indeed such questions were even being asked in the first place. Today, there are mountains of literature and research into those topics. That's not even remotely comparable.
I'd like to think there are some things today which we have got completely wrong. That we're not just refining correct theories.
I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.
You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software development is representative of software development in general.
"I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding."
Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will happen.
And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is mostly how we (the average human) lives.
It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That was one of the sentiments they were trying to express - through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
It's not about writing, this isn't like "Hey if we write in big letters surely they can read it" because there is no reason to think people will have English or even writing at such a distance in time. These are NON-LINGUISTIC messages. Their expression as written text is for our convenience in assessing the project, which is to deliver that message without language.
"This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ?
One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
Yeah, I have a master's in philosophy and semiology, I know exactly what they're getting at, but at the same time almost any kind of message of warning is going to be misconstrued and inverted anyway. One may as well write: "Extremely radioactive waste" in English and a few other languages - the future culture will either be able understand that because they're still at our level, or they won't at all and have to work it out for themselves. Virtually everything we've found with an ancient curse we've completely disregarded, same for dynamiting our way into the Great Pyramid, and also "honour" isn't what it used to be, and as a concept regarded wholly differently by almost every society on earth, even between individuals in the same society, so I wouldn't even bother invoking a concept like that in a warning.
The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.
The entire premise is an exercise in fear mongering, not aimed at people 10,000 years in the future but rather at people in the present. The message is that we must not use nuclear power because the waste is so dangerous that we have to go to elaborate theatrical lengths to prevent cave men in the future from killing themselves with it.
The most sensible way to deal with the waste, after burning up transuranic waste in nuclear reactors (common sense), is to put it somewhere that the effort to find and retrieve it is so great that only people who already knew what they were doing could manage to get their hands on it. The most obvious candidates for such a method are dumping it into the ocean. If you want to get fancy it could first be dissolved into water, or instead vitrified and sealed. Either way, it could be placed directly on the sea floor in deep parts of the ocean, or dropped into subduction zones, or buried beneath the sea floor. Any of these would be adequate. Another option is horizontal boreholes a few kilometers deep, but that's a bit less practical.
Of course people today lose their lids at the thought of a little tritium getting dumped into the ocean; this is the result of the same sort fear mongering campaigns that "this is not a place of honor" comes from. But this is a sociological problem deliberately created by activists, not a technological problem. A great deal of nuclear waste, including spent fuel and reactor components, was dumped into the ocean in the 20th century and nobody crying about Japan's tritium loses much sleep over that waste. China pretends that Japan's tritium will ruin fish for China, but they're not acting concerned about the several hundred TBq of nuclear waste the Soviet Union dumped into the Sea of Japan. Their objections to Japan dumping their tritium are political theater. The impact this oceanic dumping has had since it was done decades ago can be studied, and the answer is that it's not an issue. Water is a really great shielding material and very deep water is really good at keeping meddling idiots away from things. Much better than any spooky monument or deliberately poisoned land.
At the same time those activists likely don't want oil, gas, or coal either. They probably wouldn't enjoy the countryside being covered with solar panels and wind farms. Not sure how you'd win if it's from an activist perspective with some kind of escatological focus ten-thousand years hence used as a mode of attempting social change today.
I don't see what the major issue is with burying radioactive waste inside a mountain and then dynamiting and sealing the entrance so it can't be accessed without serious excavation machinery. (Finland is doing this). Uranium is naturally occurring, we've just condensed it a bit. The civilisation that encounters it would need decent technology to dig it up, and if they've gone backward to the point they don't then not much semiology is going to reach them.
We also have a reasonable grasp of some of the meaning and motivations inherent in rock art from Aboriginal cultures and Lascaux. Much of that is 10,20,30 thousand years old. Communicating at that distance isn't some impossible task of semiology, but the more one tries to abstract a message into symbolic meaning, the greater the chance of it being misunderstood which is why I'd stand by my point of writing it in English and other languages to give a key. Could carve it into granite alongside a well-rendered image of humans dying and in pain. Humans are pretty smart particularly when determined to understand something. If they're completely illiterate it might even inspire them to realise that language can be encoded as symbols, but I don't know what would have to come about whereby we'd lose that ability now. And if it's got that bad, then a mountain full of uranium is going to be the least of their problems.
There would have been some students at West Point in 1828 whose families owned slaves. Slavery was only abolished in New York State one year prior to this. "Incessantly racist" is probably underselling it.
>Among the artifacts scientists uncovered were a liberty dollar coin from 1800, a 50 cent piece from 1828, a quarter from 1818, a dime from 1827, a 5 cent coin from 1795, a penny from 1827 and an Erie Canal commemorative medal from 1826, which was issued to celebrate the completion of the Erie Canal in upstate New York in 1825.
I'm not denying there was racism and slavery at the time. I was asking if the contents would reflect a society that never had a thought or action that didn't revolve around hate, i.e. 'incessantly'. Do you think the contents meet this criteria?
Also, keep in mind that at this point the American Colonization Society (then Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America) is a thing.
The ACS isn't in favour of slavery, but it also doesn't want free black people in America. Instead, it proposes what today you'd hear yelled by bigots as "Send them back". It wants the United States of America to be a white country, and it's going to literally ship all the black people to Africa.
So yeah, no slavery there, but still "incessantly racist" seems a good characterisation.
1828 was probably the least racist time in history up to that point in history. All of human history prior to that is endless tribal and imperial conflict. U.S. was the first country that ever even explicitly set out to legally equalize unrelated people from different religions and ethnic backgrounds and simultaneously do away with the concept of inherited nobility entirely.
There were other multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires in the past that treated all citizens or subjects equally. Rome, the Mongols, and the Achaemenids left their constituent peoples to govern themselves as long as they paid taxes and remained peaceful. Rome even made everyone a citizen by the 3rd century or something (can't be bothered to look it up right now).
As for inherited nobility...that's just how things have been done for most of human history. The Americas were able to start over without that baggage.
> U.S. was the first country that ever even explicitly set out to legally equalize unrelated people from different religions and ethnic backgrounds
No they didn't! They could have done - racial equality was discussed at the time, as was gender equality, but they compromised in favor of allowing the slave states into the US in the first constitution. Many of which had racism embedded in the state constitutions in ways that were never even attempted back in Europe, such as prohibitions on miscegenation.
The U.S. Military Academy will open and unveil the contents of a nearly 200-year-old time capsule during a ceremony on August 28 at 10:30 a.m. in Robinson Auditorium at Thayer Hall.
I'm also curious if it has anything unsavory to modern sensibility. For a point of reference, "Jump Jim Crow" was written in 1828, but it had yet to become the major hit it was destined to be and wasn't published in sheet form yet. The era of minstrel shows as mainstream entertainment was still a little ways off.
Top comment says this was contemporary with Robert E Lee, a man so racist that he rebelled against his country and got a lot of people killed for it, so .. yes?
>Among the artifacts scientists uncovered were a liberty dollar coin from 1800, a 50 cent piece from 1828, a quarter from 1818, a dime from 1827, a 5 cent coin from 1795, a penny from 1827 and an Erie Canal commemorative medal from 1826, which was issued to celebrate the completion of the Erie Canal in upstate New York in 1825.
I'm not denying there was racism and slavery at the time. I was asking if the contents would reflect a society that never had a thought or action that didn't revolve around hate, i.e. 'incessantly'. Do you think the contents meet this criteria?
