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, listeners.

This is James, as always.

And I've got a special episode for you today.

This is a movie discussion that I did with Steve Guerra.

As you know, I love movies,

especially history movies. Steve loves movies, after all, the man has an entire podcast about movies. And so when we were working on our War of 1812 series, we decided we would try to do

one or two movie episodes. So we went back and looked and we found that there are very few movies on the War

of 1812, especially when you compare it to say World War II, and especially there are very

few recent War of 1812 movies.

So we ended up just doing one. So if you don't like movie episodes, and I know

some people don't, that's fine. You can just skip this one and next week we'll kick off

the Texas Revolution. But even if you don't like movie episodes, I encourage you to give this

one a try because as I always try to do, we don't just discuss the

movie itself, but we go pretty deep into the history behind the movie. This is a fascinating

movie about Jean Lafitte and his relationship with Andrew Jackson around the time of the

Battle of New Orleans. And it's not a fantastic movie. I'll go ahead and just spoil that

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