Popular Culture
The incident looms large in a novel by John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). Although Updike's protagonist is trying (in the early 1990s) to write about the mid-1970s, he spent those years seeking to write a book about President Buchanan, and his mind keeps reverting to the 19th century and, among other incidents, the mission of this sloop to Sumter.
The Star of the West Medal is awarded annually to the "best drilled cadet" at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. Each medal awarded has a small piece of wood salvaged from the original Star of the West ship.
Read more about this topic: Star Of The West
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)