In this sense, it was one of the few truly significant books written by an American in the nineteenth century.
Mahan was born at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, eldest son of Mary Helena Okill Mahan and Dennis Hart Mahan, professor of civil and military engineering, dean of faculty at the Academy, and the author of seminal works on field fortifications and infantry tactics. Mahan grew to young manhood in a home filled with books and journals and in an atmosphere of drums, bugles, and marching men. His was a world of Duty-Honor-Country ruled by a stern father who was as dedicated a practitioner of absolute discipline in his own household as he was in his classes and at parade. How this rigid upbringing affected young Mahan is not known. He scarcely mentioned his father or the West Point years in his autobiography, From Sail to Steam (1907).
At age twelve Mahan was placed in St. James's School, an Episcopal boarding school in Hagerstown, Maryland. Two years later his father entered him in Columbia College in New York City.
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