Mahan
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
ALFRED THAYER (mahan'), an American naval officer and writer; born in West Point, N. Y., Sept. 27, 1840; was graduated at the United States Naval Academy, in 1859; served in the Civil War; was president of the Naval War College, Newport, in 1886- 1889 and 1892-1893. He was retired at his own request Nov. 17, 1896. During the war with Spain he was a member of the Naval Board of Strategy; and in 1899 was appointed by President McKinley as one of the American delegates to the Universal Peace Conference at The Hague. His chief work "Influence of Sea Power upon History" (1890), with its continuation, "Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire" (1892), gave him a world-wide reputation. He published also: "The Gulf and Inland Waters" (1883); "Life of Admiral Farragut" (1892); "The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future" (1897), a compilation of his magazine articles; "Life of Nelson" (1897); "Lessons of the Spanish War" (1899); "Armaments and Arbitration" (1910); "Major Operations of the Navies in the 'War of American Independence (1913). He died in 1914. ("the MAHANADI (mä-ha-nud'i) great river"), a river of India, rising in the Central province, in lat. 20° 10' N., lon. 82° E. After an E. course of 520 miles, 300 miles of which are navigable, having divided into several branches at or near the town of Cuttack, which forms the head of its delta, it flows E. and S. E. through the district of that name, and falls by several mouths into the Bay of Bengal.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 that "Influence of Sea Power upon History" (1890) "gave him a world-wide reputation," and the biographical facts of Mahan's life, closed by his death in 1914, need no revision. What has moved is the fate of his argument: the concentrated battleship fleet seeking a decisive engagement, which navies from Theodore Roosevelt's to Tirpitz's built on his reasoning, was displaced within a generation by the aircraft carrier and the submarine, and later by the guided missile, so that Mahan is now read as a strategic theorist and historian rather than a guide to fleet design. He is still taught at the U.S. Naval War College he once led, and his works have been studied closely by Chinese and Indian naval writers arguing for their own blue-water fleets. The entry's second item, the Mahanadi, has changed on the ground: the Hirakud Dam, completed in the 1950s, now impounds it far above Cuttack.
Written for this edition, 2026.