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.

Music 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 have Steve Guerra with me to help me out to get through this interesting story of

the northern part of the War of 1812. Steve, how you doing, sir? I'm great. I'm ready to get into

this. I've got my sea legs back on again. We keep switching land to sea, land to sea.

That's right. Yes, it's an interesting war because there is so much naval combat and

even combat on the Great Lakes. And we're going to be talking about that a lot today.

We're also going to look at some political and economic events toward the end of the episode.

So in our last episode, we saw that the Americans made a second attempt to invade

Canada in three places. And basically, they were one for three. So their batting average was

33. That's pretty good if you're an actual professional baseball player. But it's not very good

if you're trying to wage a war. They were successful in recapturing Detroit and even

pushing into Upper Canada in the Northwest Frontier, the Northwest Theater, if you will. But on the

Niagara front, they made a few initial gains, but then were pushed right back out of Canada by the

British. And then they tried to attack Montreal,

and that was another failure. So in this episode, let's see what's going to happen on the water.

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