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.

Welcome to another special episode of Key Battles of World War I on film. I'm James Early,

your host. This is yet another in our mini-series of episodes in which my friend,

Sean McIver and I will discuss several of the best movies about World War I. In today's episode,

we will discuss the 2011 film War Horse, directed by the prolific and iconic director Steven Spielberg.

My guest, Sean, is a host of the excellent podcast Come and Take It,

which is about Texas history, culture, food, music, you name it, all things, Texas.

Check it out.

It's a great podcast.

Sean is also a major movie buff.

And I'm, as always, very excited to have him with me. How you doing, Sean?

Doing well. Very, very good. Okay, so, Warhorse, here we go. I think, I'm pretty sure that this is the only film we've looked at where the main character is an animal rather than a person, or at least it seems that way.

Before we get going into the plot, as always, I will give a little bit of introductory

information, just some of the basic statistical stuff, if you will, or not statistical

stuff, but information about how it's been received and what awards it may have received

and things like that so the

movie as I mentioned came out in the year 2011 so not super duper long ago director

...