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Albritton Center for Grand Strategy

Renowned Historian, Dr. Paul Kennedy, to Present New Book at the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum

Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order | April 28 | 5 pm CT

The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy and the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University will host renowned historian, Dr. Paul Kennedy, Thursday, April 28, 2022. Dr. Kennedy will discuss his newest book, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order (Yale University Press, 2022).

The event will be held at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum in the Presidential Orientation Theatre & Rotunda (1000 George Bush Dr. W, College Station, TX 77845). Dr. Kennedy will be signing books from 4:00 – 5:00 PM CST in the Rotunda; books will be available for purchase onsite with a 20% discount off list price. Registration is required for the lecture, which begins at 5:00 PM CST. Register online to attend.

Dr. Paul Kennedy’s Biography

Paul Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Director of International Security Studies at Yale, and Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, coordinates the ISS programs funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation. He is internationally known for his writings and commentaries on global political, economic, and strategic issues. He is the author of Grand Strategies in War and Peace, From War to Peace, and Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.

About the Book

In this engaging narrative, brought to life by marine artist Ian Marshall’s beautiful full‑color paintings, Kennedy grapples with the rise and fall of the Great Powers during World War II. Tracking the movements of the six major navies of the Second World War—the allied navies of Britain, France, and the United States and the Axis navies of Germany, Italy, and Japan—Kennedy tells a story of naval battles, maritime campaigns, convoys, amphibious landings, and strikes from the sea. From the elimination of the Italian, German, and Japanese fleets and almost all of the French fleet, to the end of the era of the big‑gunned surface vessel, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the rise of an American economic and military power larger than anything the world had ever seen, Kennedy shows how the strategic landscape for naval affairs was completely altered between 1936 and 1946.

 The Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) is a research institute housed in the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. The Institute is named in honor of Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret.), whose long and distinguished career in public service included serving as National Security Advisor for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. The Institute’s core mission is to foster and disseminate policy-oriented research on international affairs by supporting faculty and student research, hosting international speakers and major scholarly conferences, and providing grants to outside researchers to use the holdings of the Bush Library.

The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy (CGS) serves as an intellectual hub for the critical examination of American grand strategy. Specifically, the Center supports research that takes a fresh look at America’s grand strategic choices; fosters dialogue between scholars and practitioners; and helps prepare a new generation of public servants who will be grand strategic thinkers.