The military policy of the United States

War dept. doc. no.290; Edited by Joseph P. Sanger, assisted by William D. Beach and Charles D. Rhodes, of the Military information division of the General staff, from an unpublished manuscript to which General Upton had devoted the last years of his life. Posthumously edited and published masterwork by Brevet Major General Emory Upton [1839-1881], a brilliant synthesis of military history and policy that was the first overall military history of the United States. Widely circulated in manuscript throughout the Army between Upton's death in 1881 and its publication in 1904, ordered by Secretary of War Elihu Root [1845-1937]. Root's preface to this edition traces the book's origins and history and quotes many favorable comments on the manuscript by such authorities as General William Tecumseh Sherman. Upton, thought of as the Army's counterpart to the Navy's great military historian and strategic thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan, died by his own hand in 1881, after suffering a series of increasingly painful headaches thought by some to have been caused by a brain tumor.