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 a special mini episode of Key Battles of the War of 1812.

This is your host, James Early, as always.

And I've got Steve Guerra, as always. I do. Don't I, Steve? Are you there?

Yeah, I sure am here. Oh, good, good. I'm delighted that you're here. So Steve and I are going to do

what Steve always used to call a sidetrack episode, and sometimes they use that term this this is some really good

information that we wanted to bring to you but it just doesn't quite fit into any of the other

episodes or if we did fit it in it would make them excessively long so we try to keep as you know

by now each regular episode to an hour or less so we we're going to, this one's going to be very

short. I don't know how long, maybe 15, 20 minutes. But again, very important information. So this,

this is some political and social stuff that was going on in 1814. In our last episode, we talked

about the British raids and invasions of various parts of the U.S.

So what's going on politically while this is happening?

We're going to start by talking about something that authors call the Crisis of 1814.

So while these raids were going on all over different parts of the country, you know, we saw

that they took over part of Maine.

They were raiding in the Chesapeake.

...