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.
This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.
There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child.
Listen my children and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
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