No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.
Interpretation
Sea power is crucial for victory in modern warfare and rebellions.
This quote emphasizes the importance of naval strength in securing victory during significant modern conflicts and rebellions. It suggests that control of the seas has been a determining factor in achieving military success, as it provides strategic advantages in transportation, supply lines, and engaging the enemy.
In practice
A historian might use this quote when discussing naval battles in World War II.
But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period-Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States-are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao.
The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.
So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.
Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.
A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. . . . A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.
In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side.
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Every February, we reflect on and honor the achievements, struggles, and icons that comprise Black history. As a proud, Black man running for office and raising two young, Black boys in the South, I am acutely aware that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that werenβt realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
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