By arguing that sea power—the strength of a nation’s navy—was the key to strong foreign policy, Alfred Thayer Mahan shaped American military planning and helped prompt a worldwide naval race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mahan studied at Columbia for two years beginning in 1854—he was a member of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary club established in 1802—before decamping for Annapolis, from which he graduated in 1859. A longtime naval officer who cut his teeth on the Union side in the Civil War, Mahan eventually lectured on history and strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. It was there, inspired in part by a history of Rome, that he began developing his theories; in 1890 he turned his lecture notes into The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783.
Italian city states were a political phenomenon of small independent states, around the northern part of the Italian peninsula around the 9th and the 15th century. They were governed independently
Depends on how you look at it.. They were desperate and had to stop the British from gaining support. But it wasn't confirmed that It was carrying weapons, there were civilians on it so theres good reasoning why they sunk it. The Germans did not let civilian casualties get in their way really as seen with their bombing of cities and use of chemical warfare.
