Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) was an American naval officer and historian who studied and wrote extensively about the importance of sea power and its crucial impact on world history. A proponent of the concept that a powerful navy was crucial in the age of international tension in which he lived, Mahan's detailed accounts of the role that battles for control of the sea played in various wars were closely studied in his own time and long after by naval strategists all over the world in the late 19th and 20th centuries. His other Dover books are the widely praised text The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1763 and Mahan on Naval Warfare.