From his lectures came the basis for his most important work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660–1783, which appeared in 1890. It was not his intention to do original research but rather to use the best historical works available to investigate his chosen field. His duties at the war college forced him to crystallize his thoughts on sea power and history. He probably received the assignment because he wrote “The Gulf and Inland Waters,” a competent volume appearing in 1883 as a part of a larger history of the American Civil War. Mahan was selected in 1885 to lecture on naval strategy, tactics, and history at the newly established Naval War College. There was little indication during these years of the intellectual importance he was to attain. At its conclusion, he continued his navy career and traveled widely. Mahan chose the navy for his profession and, graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1859, saw active service in the American Civil War. Mahan was born at West Point, New York, where his father was a professor of military engineering at the United States Military Academy. As a historian he studied the relations of sea power and history, and he developed a philosophy of history in which the concept of force played a major role. From his studies of naval warfare he drew principles of strategy that greatly influenced the development and employment of naval forces during the first half of the twentieth century. Although his reputation as an imperialist has been overstated, his insistence that the United States must become and remain a sea power is Mahan’s greatest contribution to America’s modern superpower status.Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) was an American naval officer who wrote extensively on naval strategy and the history of sea power. Eventually he published twenty-one books and attained the presidency of the American Historical Association. Mahan retired from active duty in 1895 to write voluminously on the naval, military, and diplomatic issues of his era. Notwithstanding the limits of Mahan’s proposals, contemporary American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Cabot Lodge used Mahan’s basic thesis to justify a more aggressive and acquisitive American expansionism in emulation of England and other leading European powers. His expansionism was strategic and defensive. He did so, however, for security reasons. Mahan argued for a modern naval build-up that would protect America’s coasts–Caribbean, Gulf and Pacific–and he espoused an ishmian canal. Two years later Mahan followed his blockbuster book with a sequel The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. According to Mahan’s biographer “the book electrified foreign offices and war departments all over the world” and furnished a rationale (unintended by Mahan) for the great naval arms race of the next quarter century. Mahan became college president in 1886 after Luce’s reassignment, and he published his class lecture notes in 1890 under the title The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, a volume that attributed England’s global influence to the power and scope of the Royal Navy. Mahan’s volume The Gulf and Inland Waters impressed Captain Stephen Luce prompting the latter to invite Mahan to lecture on naval history at the newly-established U.S. Naval Academy in 1856, he was selected by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1883 to write a book for their series, The Navy in the Civil War. Despite a less than inspiring career as a naval officer in the quarter-century following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy.Īdmiral Mahan was a man of contradictions–an army brat who became a navy officer, a brilliant intellectual who disdained formal study, and a captain who was prone to seasickness and hated sea duty. Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), the best known and most influential naval officer of the late 19th century, ironically was born at West Point, the son of Dennis Hart Mahan, a professor of military engineering and dean of faculty at the U.S.
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