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 back to Key Battles of the War of 1812.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And as always, I've got Steve Guerra with me.

Steve, say hello to the people.

Hello, people. All right. So last time we saw the Americans came up with this just wonderful

plan, amazing, amazingly complicated plan of attacking instead of being carried out at the same time. They were carried out

at different times. They were carried out piecemeal. And in fact, one of them wasn't really carried

out at all. So total, as we said, the key phrase, the drinking phrase, go ahead and take a shot.

I'm going to use it again. The keyword or key phrase is unmitigated disaster. Nothing went right for the United States

in their land campaign of 1812. Now we're going to turn to the sea. Let's see if things went better

on the water. You wouldn't think so necessarily because the British Navy, as every history buff knows, is the greatest

Navy in the world, the greatest Navy the world was ever seen to this point. And the American Navy

is tiny. So it's a real David versus Goliath battle. But can David as the original David,

can this David pull off an upset?

I think it's, I'd love to hear about these different ships because that's,

I think for everybody to get on the same page, because there's so many different ships

...