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 special episode of Key Battles of American History.

I'm your host, James Early.

As always, this is another one in the series of episodes that have been requested by members of

Early's Raiders, which is my group on Patreon that supports the podcast. We've seen several

of these in the past, and this is yet another one. This episode was requested by Colonel Lee

Beaumont, and since Lee is a colonel, he gets a little bit longer episode.

This is supposed to be a full-length episode comparable in length to just the average run of the

bill episode that you might have heard during, say, the Pacific War series. I'm really not sure how

long it's going to be. It's probably not going to be quite that long. I don't think it'll be

an hour. It may be 40, 45 minutes. We'll see. I'm doing this solo and I don't have a partner,

and so there's not going to be a lot of off-the-cuff banter and back and forth. But nevertheless,

I hope you will enjoy it. This episode deals with the role of the U.S. Navy and Marines and the Boxer Rebellion.

That's a small war that the U.S. was involved in that most people have never even heard of,

and even history buffs probably don't know a lot about it. I certainly didn't before I did my

research for this episode. I knew a little bit, but I learned a ton during the research,

and I hope you'll learn a ton yourself and enjoy this. And as I always say, I hope you'll be

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