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Alfred T. Mahan (1840-1914) was an American naval officer and historian. Born in West Point, New York, Mahan was the son of a United States Military Academy professor. Despite his military background, Mahan enrolled in the Naval Academy after two years at Columbia University and graduated second in his class in 1859. For the next several years he served on the frigate Congress before joining the Pocahontas. Commissioned as a lieutenant during the Civil War, Mahan sailed on the USS Worcester and James Adger, earning a series of promotions that would culminate with his ascendance to the rank of captain. As commander of the USS Wachusett, he defended American interests in Callao, Peru in the waning months of the War of the Pacific. Mahan later worked as a lecturer of naval history and tactics at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Encouraged by College President Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, he developed the research and lectures that would eventually become his highly influential studies of sea power, including The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) and The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (1897). Central to his academic work was the theory that sea power is an essential aspect of national greatness and historical prowess. Despite a lack of evidence and dependance on secondary sources, Mahan’s work was used to justify European and American imperialism in Africa and Asia and earned him an international reputation as a leading strategist and intellectual of the nineteenth century.
