War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of Key Battles of the War of 1812.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And once again, I'm joined by my good buddy and my co-host, Steve Gwara. Steve,

say hello to the people. Hello, people. All right. So last time we saw the road to war,

we saw how the relationship between the United States and Great Britain, which wasn't really

great in 1783, how it got gradually worse over the next

three decades, heavily influenced by the fact that Britain was at war with France, and eventually

it ended up in war. Despite the British government's best efforts to not go to war, a lot of

Americans seem to really want to do that, and so they did.

Now, we're going to eventually get into the first few battles, but before we do so, I wanted to do

kind of a mini episode here. We're going to talk about a couple of political things, and we're

going to talk about the two sides, war aims, their advantages and

their disadvantages, and, well, another political thing, the election of 1812, which is very

important. So these are some topics that I think are very important to cover, but they just didn't

quite fit into the first episode, and they don't really go with the second episode either.

Plus, as I said previously,

...