United States Naval Academy

On a spit of land where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay, the U.S. Naval Academy has shaped the officers who led the American Navy through the age of steam, two world wars, and the nuclear era. Founded in 1845 to replace an informal, uneven system of training midshipmen at sea, Annapolis brought naval education ashore into a rigorous academic program, and its grand Beaux-Arts campus, centered on the domed Bancroft Hall, remains one of the most striking collegiate landscapes in the country.

Before 1845, the Navy trained midshipmen largely at sea with inconsistent results. Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft established the Naval School at Fort Severn, a former Army post in Annapolis, Maryland, in October 1845, bringing academic rigor — including mathematics, navigation, and gunnery — to officer training for the first time. It was renamed the United States Naval Academy in 1850.

During the Civil War the academy relocated temporarily to Newport, Rhode Island, as Maryland's loyalties were contested, returning to Annapolis in 1865. At the turn of the 20th century the campus was dramatically rebuilt in Beaux-Arts style under architect Ernest Flagg, centered on the massive Bancroft Hall dormitory, still one of the largest single dormitories in the world, housing the entire brigade of midshipmen under one roof.

The Academy has graduated generations of naval leaders, including many astronauts and, notably, President Jimmy Carter. Women were first admitted in 1976. Today the Naval Academy remains a highly selective four-year federal service academy commissioning officers into the Navy and Marine Corps, its grounds anchored by the John Paul Jones crypt beneath the Naval Academy Chapel.