George Armstrong Custer

Born in Ohio in 1839 and raised in Michigan, George Armstrong Custer secured an appointment in 1857 to West Point. At twenty-three years old, he became the Union Army’s youngest general. Custer’s metamorphosis from slain national hero to self-serving, incompetent, and even genocidal villain—still the symbolic frontier soldier, recast as a handy scapegoat for America’s sins against the Indian—has failed to dim interest in his memoirs.