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  • Cadets on Campus: History of Military Schools of the United States by John Alfred Coulter II.
  • Bradford A. Wineman
Cadets on Campus: History of Military Schools of the United States. By John Alfred Coulter II. Williams-Ford Texas A&M Military History Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 440. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-521-3.)

Military schools have been part of the American education system for nearly as long as the nation itself has been in existence. While there have been [End Page 731] numerous histories written on specific institutions and schools in certain eras, John Alfred Coulter II provides the first comprehensive study of military education writ large in the United States. Since the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1802, the nation has seen more than eight hundred educational institutions, serving grade-school children to young adults, built on the West Point model. Coulter traces the history of these military schools in the United States, exploring their evolution over time and identifying the key innovators and institutions that popularized military education, while he attempts to place this unique educational phenomenon in a broader historical context.

This is no small feat, as this book examines the entire broad spectrum of military schools, covering all levels, functions, regions, and financial sourcing. The span of these schools ranges from federal service academies (West Point and the United States Naval Academy), to state-supported military colleges (the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel), to various military junior colleges and military prep schools, all varying in their affiliation depending on their funding (public, private, or religious). Many of the schools analyzed in this book have changed their structure in some form over the years, while countless others were forced to permanently close their doors. Coulter struggles to examine this paradigm comprehensively, which unfortunately causes frustrating organizational issues in the text. The narrative attempts to organize the evolution of these institutions both chronologically and thematically, creating a recurrently choppy structure that is further segmented by frequent subheadings. As a result, the book bounces inconsistently from focus on an individual institution to groups of institutions to broader movements affecting all military education.

While Coulter falls short in finding his argument's synthesis and flow, he fortunately succeeds in other key efforts. He adeptly links the evolution of military education to broader political, cultural, and social movements such as the Lost Cause, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to name a few. In doing so, he traces the variance in popularity and social impact of these schools over nearly two centuries of American history. Moreover, he places military institutions in a national context, successfully departing from the preponderance of scholarship that identifies them as a primarily southern regional phenomenon. Lastly, Coulter uses the history of these academies to set up his conclusion, where he discusses how these schools fit into the current framework of American education and society, a topic that has gotten little attention since the coeducational court cases of the late 1990s. And in that effort, he alludes to what role these institutions may play in the future, continuing to build on an over two-hundred-year-old tradition into the twenty-first century.

While his all-inclusive methodology does make it challenging to connect unifying themes, Coulter's extensive use of primary sources commendably traces the impact of military schools on American education and society over time. His appendixes, which catalog the institutions included in his research, provide a truly useful resource for scholars of this subject. Although his narrative errs on the side of generality, Coulter's work offers a valuable contribution to the topic. This book laudably is the first of its kind and will [End Page 732] hopefully inspire further studies examining military education broadly and microscopically.

Bradford A. Wineman
Marine Corps University
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