Quarterdeck and Bridge by James C. Bradford

Author:James C. Bradford [Bradford, James C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612512624
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

FURTHER READING

The most complete and important source for an understanding of Alfred Thayer Mahan is Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, eds., Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, 3 vols. (Annapolis, Md., 1975). Mahan letters known by Seager or Maguire to have surfaced since 1975 have been directed to the attention of the curator of the Mahan Collection at the Naval War College Library in Newport, R.I. For information on the nature, content, and extent of the Mahan Papers at the War College, see John B. Hattendorf, comp., Register of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Papers (Newport, R.I., 1987). In addition, Professor Hattendorf and his sister-in-law, Lynn C. Hattendorf, have compiled A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Newport, R.I., 1986). Excellent in every respect, this work supersedes and renders obsolete all other biblio graphical treatments of Mahan. Far from excellent is Mahan’s autobiography, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York, 1907). It is uniformly self-serving and highly selective from a factual standpoint. Nonetheless, it is an important and unique historical document that also must be consulted.

Four full-length biographies of Mahan have appeared since his death in 1914. The first of these, The Life of Admiral Mahan (London, 1920), was written by Charles Carlisle Taylor, sometime British vice consul at New York. Based on interviews with Mahan family members, on conversations with a number of individuals who knew Mahan personally, and on a scattering of letters supplied by a few of Mahan’s correspondents, Taylor’s effort was superficial, episodic, and eulogistic, and he emphasized the Anglo-American dimension in Mahan’s life and writings.

Taylor’s book was followed two decades later by U.S. Navy Captain W. D. Puleston’s Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, U.S.N. (New Haven, Conn., 1939). The first extended evaluation by a fellow naval officer, it remains a solid, though somewhat dull, encyclopedic and narrowly conceived account of Mahan’s professional naval life, which, in Puleston’s view, was illuminated throughout by the brilliance and grandeur of Mahan’s philosophy of sea power and its influence on history. Although Puleston’s sources were far more numerous and more revealing than were Taylor’s, his hagiographic account was essentially a glowing fitness report on Mahan into which nothing negative was permitted to intrude.

The first historiographically professional treatment of Mahan’s life and works was William E. Livezey’s Mahan on Sea Power (Norman, Okla., 1947). Utilizing the perspective of the naval and diplomatic aspects of the two World Wars and the historical antecedents of both conflicts, Professor Livezey produced a sophisticated evaluation of Mahan’s doctrine of sea power viewed from a modern geopolitical, diplomatic, and technological standpoint, and he first questioned the usefulness of the doctrine in a militarily scientific world that Mahan never conceived.

Livezey’s path-breaking account has been supplemented by Robert Seager Il’s Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis, Md., 1977). Basing his work on much hitherto unused primary source material, Livezey’s work, and factual data found only in Taylor, Puleston, and From Sail to Steam, as well as a

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