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Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. Navy medical men, believing that airborne filth--miasmata--caused many of the diseases afflicting sailors and that humid air carries more filth than dry, sought to curtail the cleaning of the decks of warships with wet swabs. They met resistance to this reform from line officers who, from a variety of motives, were committed to keeping their ships clean. The medical reform movement attained its greatest intensity in the 1870s but quickly dissipated at the end of the century when steel hulls replaced wooden ones and the germ theory of disease replaced the theory of miasmata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have generally recognized The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) as a significant event in the political, military, and economic history of South America. Applying an international lens to the conflict reveals its influence on extra-regional states and actors. Violence along the Pacific Slope in the 1860s stimulated demand for surplus (especially U.S. Civil War-era) and experimental weapons, while also offering an operational laboratory for their evaluation. During the war, additional and decidedly "modern" technologies were produced by foreign firms and local actors alike. Information about the efficacy of these systems was carefully documented by international observers as far away as the United States and China. Beginning in the 1880s, Chilean naval preponderance in the American Pacific-a key military result of the war-threatened both U.S. expansion in the region and the ideology of racial superiority which underwrote it. That challenge, in turn, stimulated and for many justified the emergence of the U.S. "New Navy" in the 1890s. An international perspective, as such, suggests the profound and unpredictable ways in which regional or peripheral violence articulated with Great Power politics and navalism in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to end prize money--monetary awards to naval personnel for the capture of enemy ships and cargoes in wartime--for the United States Navy began shortly after the War of 1812. They were redoubled following the Civil War (1861-1865). But only in 1899 did numerous particularly American motives--ideological, fiscal, pragmatic, psychological, and strategic--unite to put an end to naval prize money in the United States. In contrast, the United Kingdom maintained naval prize money for another fifty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Communist Tet Offensive of 1968, General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, supposedly credited the Army-Navy Mobile Riverine Force (MRF) with having "saved the [Mekong] Delta" for the allied cause. The MRF drove enemy forces from key population centers and decimated the Viet Cong main force units that stood and fought them. But in August 1969, General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland's successor, disbanded the MRF. Despite the MRF's impressive battle history, Army and Navy leaders never fully embraced the creation, development, or operational deployment of one of the few truly joint-service units of the Vietnam War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of combined army-navy operations and the development of Union military strategy during the first year of the war. It argues that the army and the navy, despite differences in service culture, a paucity of joint doctrine, and the absence of a "formal" general staff system were, in fact, working together to design and implement an overall strategic concept during the crucial opening months of the conflict. Despite several early examples of impressive inter-service cooperation, however, the greater use of combined army-navy operations eventually succumbed to the confluence of personality, military paradigm, and strategic choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the U.S. Civil War ironclad battleship, the USS Monitor, focusing on the life of U.S. Navy seaman Jacob Nicklis while on board the ship by presenting his correspondence. Other topics include the design of the Monitor and information on its engagements, information on everyday life aboard the Monitor, and information on the sinking of the Monitor during a storm on New Year's Eve 1862.

The article examines the role of the marine environment in naval operations during the Spanish-American War era. Off Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, naval commanders struggled with inaccurate charts in a complex marine environment. Long associated with the needs of maritime commerce, the Navy's charts and sailing directions could not account for the new strategic importance of these waters. Knowledge of the marine environment was increasingly critical to command of the sea. This article reveals ways in which marine environmental history can deepen our understanding of war at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that U.S. occupations in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti in the first third of the twentieth century lasted as long as they did for political reasons. U.S. military commanders disagreed with civilians in the State Department partly because of a lack of both policy guidance and interdepartmental coordination. In addition, State grew more sensitive than Navy to negative public opinion both foreign and domestic and to national political strategy. Marines, meanwhile, were more driven to reform the societies they occupied but also less sensitive to their own abuses, to changing norms, and to geopolitical reasons for ending occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians overwhelmingly agree that the U.S. Navy changed dramatically between the early 1880s and World War I, but few have asked how the "New Navy" of this era planned to fight its battles. This article seeks to recover its ideas about battle tactics, using torpedo development as a point of entry. Although officials thought seriously about torpedoes' tactical implications, technological complexity and habits of institutional communication hindered the navy's ability to agree on them, and important questions remained unresolved on the eve of World War I in 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admiral William Halsey gained both fame and scorn for his direction of fleet forces in World War II. Most historians have attributed his command performance to personality traits; Halsey was aggressive, bold, and impetuous. But his command of naval forces in World War II was as much the product of nearly four decades in uniform as it was any innate trait. From 1914 to 1922, Halsey learned much about naval warfare and fighting from his service with destroyers, which took place largely under the direction of Admiral William Sims, one of the Navy's greatest reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'unification' of the United States Army and Navy under the 1947 National Security Act, combined with efforts to cut expenditures after the Second World War, spawned vicious inter-service competition that undermined civilian control of the military. The nastiest feuds were between the Air Force and Navy, and then the Navy and civilian leaders of the fledgling Department of Defence. What appears as an esoteric dispute over the utility of bombers versus aircraft carriers was merely the tip of a larger struggle over the future of American military strategy. Civilian efforts to end this destructive inter-service rivalry and force the military to live within its budgetary constraints provoked open defiance during the so-called 'Revolt of the Admirals' in 1949. National Security Council Paper 68 offered a way out of this predicament by outlining a quasi-Keynesian fiscal policy based on rearmament that would stimulate the economy enough to offset the additional defence spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the American Civil War (1861-65) a crisis in civil-military relations culminated in the U.S. Navy's disastrous April 1863 attack by an all-ironclad fleet on the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This article examines the serious differences between Union Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and his assistant Gustavus Fox and sheds light on the relief of a senior military commander and on questionable decisions by key civilian leaders. While Welles and Fox—both highly competent administrators—do not emerge untarnished from this episode, Du Pont must take the lion's share of the blame for the battle's outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The naval treaty system inaugurated at Washington in 1922 channeled innovation in the U.S. Navy. The Washington Naval Treaty eliminated the ability of the United States to construct new bases or to improve existing ones in the western Pacific. It fell to the General Board of the Navy to implement the clauses of the Washington Treaty. The General Board was also charged with the responsibility of preparing and attending subsequent naval conferences during the period. The General Board was the critical link between the Navy and the naval treaty system. As such, the General Board both shaped and was shaped by the treaty system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on a time-series study conducted to determine whether the social background, particularly the father's occupation, of the Young Turk generation of officers of the U.S. Navy of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries appears to have mattered. Collection of data from a 1972 study of the U.S. Naval Academy from 1840-1920s; Findings obtained by the study.

The article focuses on formative period in the history of the U.S. Navy and creation of a learning culture that enabled the Navy to survive the initial shocks of World War II. It mentions U.S. Navy indeed did possess a doctrine developed in those years through the interplay of experimentation in the Atlantic Fleet, wargaming exercises at the Naval War College, and the experience of World War I. It also mentions the command style of Admiral Horatio Nelson in Battle of Jutland.

The article provides an overview of the rearmament of the U.S. Navy during the interwar period of 1933-1939, during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Topics include military preparedness, parallels between the post World War I period and the post-Cold War period for the Navy in the U.S., shipbuilding, infrastructure, and government-industrial relations.

This article disputes explanations of American expansionism that are based on the requirements of national security or more abstract theories such as the balance of power. In contradistinction to the imperatives of defence and survival, the article shows how civilisational factors weighed heavily on the emergence of US grand strategy at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular assumptions about the peoples of the Third World being lesser played an important role in the conception and legitimation of imperial expansion. During this period, the US Navy went through a dramatic build-up. The article shows the ways in which the worldviews of many of the key players (such as Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt) contributed to the militarisation of global racism, a development that led to widespread killing in the Philippines and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the Idaho desert during the 1940s in relation to the United States Navy's production of naval artillery. Implications of World War II; Conditions surrounding Navy's West Coast ordnance plant construction; Role of Bureau of Ordnance team; Conditions of Navy's operation of plant; Status of nuclear training at plant during 1950s; Statistical information on cost of center; Role of Navy after war ended; Navy's description of the center.

Examines the early steam era of American Navy and the nature of contemporary diplomacy during the American Civil War. Steam power as critical factor in naval planning; Importance of coal in foreign policy followed during the Civil War; Stand of the British government on the issue; Note on Union and Confederate naval provocation during the war; American Foreign policy in general.

Presents a technological perspective of the creation and demobilization of the Office of Naval Intelligence, established by the United States Navy, in 1882. Factors that influence the establishment of this division; Objectives of this division; Length of time that the office existed; What led to the downfall of this division.

Examines the process that led to fundamental change in American naval policy that provide insights into the Navy Department's wartime mobilization program. President Woodrow Wilson's appointment of Josephus Daniels to be the Navy secretary; Daniels' populist sentiments by attacking long-established naval traditions; Importance that Daniels' cabinet position would assume in Wilson's second term.

Focuses on the United States Marine Corps's interest in and association with the French professional military education system in the interwar years. Ecole Superieure de Guerre; Background information on the Corps's development of a professional military education program for its career officers; Course of instruction; French assessment of the Marines; Marine interests elsewhere.

The article deals with several efforts by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force to develop the first true generation of military space professionals. Three supporting events in 2017 are said to be expected to improve professionalism, including the publication of President Donald J. Trump's National Security Strategy. Several lessons from the U.S. Navy in the late 1800s are also cited, including the need to exploit technological advances and having a unifying doctrine.

The article focuses on charges brought against gay Navy sailors in Newport, Rhode Island between 1919 and 1921 for same-sex acts. Topics include the accused men's lack of due process, how then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) implemented the charges under Section A, O.A.S.N. (Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy), and how this constructed a national security state during World War I.

The article discusses the U.S. Navy's studies of the 1916 Battle of Jutland, a naval battle between the British Royal Navy's Grand Fleet under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe and the Imperial German Navy's High Seas Fleet under vice-admiral Reinhard Scheer during the World War I. It discusses U.S. Captain William S. Sims's reconstruction of the battle in detail using Naval War College methods of analysis. Also discussed is Jellicoe grandson Nicholas's analysis of the battle.

Historians have long recognized Matthew Fontaine Maury as an important if controversial figure in the histories of science and of maritime and naval affairs. These assessments, however, rest on scholarship that is by now more than a half-century old. It is therefore appropriate to look at Maury’s significance from fresh perspectives, incorporating recent historiographical trends in the history of science and cartography, environmental history, cultural history and military history. This article focuses on the ways in which Maury’s cartographic work reframed mariners’ understanding of the marine environment away from what he perceived to be a watery wilderness towards an ordered environment safe and favourable to American commerce. Maury was long known as ‘The Pathfinder of the Seas’, but I argue that his significance, in fact, lies in the ways he and his staff at the Naval Observatory organized the sea as a ‘common highway’, tracing paths, but also imposing narratives and constructing new meanings. Maury’s tool was the nautical chart and, particularly, his Wind and Current Charts series that by the 1850s reimagined the ways mariners, navigators and naval officers understood and harnessed the ocean environment. The article briefly considers these charts from three perspectives – method, process and representation – in order to see the ways in which Maury was pushing the boundaries of the cartographic medium to usher in revolutionary ways of envisioning the ocean environment. By quantifying winds, symbolizing whales and infusing the sea with ship tracks, among other things, Maury was imposing potent, if sometimes flawed, new ways of understanding and imagining the sea that were central to American maritime expansion in the antebellum era. In this and other ways, we can see Maury anew, a figure central to the growth of American commercial empire and to new ways of understanding and thinking about the sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, historians of science have treated him more poorly. He is often portrayed as an uneducated amateur who jumped to conclusions about the oceans based on slim evidence and biblical reasoning, and who missed the opportunity provided by the founding of the US Naval Observatory to place American scientists on a competitive footing with their European counterparts. Consigning Maury to the category of disappointing amateur, however, misses the opportunities his case presents to better understand the historical milieu in which he worked, as well as his enduring contributions to the scientific exploration of the deep ocean. This article reconsiders Maury as scientist, siting the origins of his poor historical reputation in arguments over the professionalization of science and of the navy. His reputation also suffered after his departure from Washington, DC, for the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War. The article examines his participation in a practice of science flavoured by its location in the nation’s capital, where science required as much attention to lobbying and leveraged connections as to the calibration of instruments. In this context, Maury was a serious scientist who embraced the task of doing science in the public interest, and he participated in an ongoing effort to further the USA’s ability to be competitive on the world stage, whether that stage was dressed for scientific achievement or commerce. Maury sought authority for his claims with a strong sense of the geopolitics of geophysics. Re-examining Maury as scientist provides a window onto a pattern of scientific practice in Washington, DC, in the middle of the 19th century whose echoes propagated through the rest of that century and into the 20th. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although he was better known as a scientist than a reformer, Matthew Fontaine Maury’s influence as the latter was hardly negligible. Maury argued for institutional expansion and reform during a period of agitation and stagnation for the American navy. Published in Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger between 1840 and 1841, Maury’s five ‘Scraps from the Lucky Bag’ agitated for wide-ranging reforms aimed at tackling the numerous inefficiencies and inadequacies of the navy. His proposed reforms served multiple purposes. Naval reform was, for Maury, a matter of necessity, and advocating for it permitted him to challenge the limited role that the navy occupied in 1840. It also served as a way for Maury to address the anxieties of the antebellum South’s maritime interests and make the case for real protection of Southern coastal waters. Lastly, Maury’s plan of reform was based in and allowed a re-imagination of the navy as the modern, powerful arm of an ambitious national project. This article considers Maury’s ‘Scraps from the Lucky Bag’ as both advocacy for naval reform and a specific vision of both the South and the nation. Situating Maury within American anxieties over expansion and international interference, this article argues that Maury leveraged, or attempted to leverage, those anxieties to achieve his goal of reform. Maury’s advocacy for naval reform was not only an argument for a larger, more technologically advanced and better organized force, but also for the territorial and maritime expansion of the United States. For Maury, these projects were fundamentally linked. A reconsideration of Maury’s efforts towards naval reform opens a window on the conflicting visions and anxieties of American expansion, both national and sectional, as well as the configuration of the American navy in the mid-19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the way the U.S. Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 changed business of strategy of the U.S. Navy. Topics include the provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act which included alterations to the military chain of command and dispersal of the naval service's strategic experts, the defense reform movement of the 1970s, and the need for greater centralization of power in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) General Colin Powell's office.

The article discusses the history of SEALAB II project, an experimental underwater habitat developed by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s to prove the viability of saturation diving and humans living in isolation for extended periods of time