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.
The British are coming. One if by land, two if by sea.
Palestine is our unforgettable historic home. The very name would be a force of marvelous potency for summoning our people together.
Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
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