After the Revolutionary War ended, the new American nation
grappled with a question about its identity: Were the states
sovereign entities or subordinates to a powerful federal
government? The War of ...1812 brought this vexing issue into sharp
relief, as a national government intent on waging an unpopular war
confronted a populace in Massachusetts that was vigorously opposed
to it. Maine, which at the time was part of Massachusetts, served
as the battleground in this political struggle.
Joshua M. Smith recounts an innovative history of the war,
focusing on how it specifically affected what was then called the
District of Maine. Drawing on archival materials from the United
States, Britain, and Canada, Smith exposes the bitter experience of
Maine's citizens during that conflict as they endured multiple
hardships, including starvation, burdensome taxation, smuggling,
treason, and enemy occupation. War's inherent miseries, along with
a changing relationship between regional and national identities,
gave rise to a statehood movement that rejected a Boston-centric
worldview in favor of a broadly American identity.
On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi ...rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation._x000B__x000B_Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois._x000B__x000B_In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences._x000B__x000B_Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.
This book is a narrative history of the many dimensions of the War of 1812 - social, diplomatic, military and political - which places the war's origins and conduct in transatlantic perspective. The ...events of 1812–15 were shaped by the larger crisis of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. In synthesizing and reinterpreting scholarship on the war, Professor J. C. A. Stagg focuses on the war as a continental event, highlighting its centrality to Canadian nationalism and state development. The book introduces the war to students and general readers, concluding that it resulted in many ways from an emerging nation-state trying to contend with the effects of rival European nationalisms, both in Europe itself and in the Atlantic world.
Coffins of the Brave Crisman, Kevin J; Rybka, Walter; Cassavoy, Kenneth ...
2014, 2014-01-30
eBook
<!CDATA In Coffins of the Brave: Lake Shipwrecks of the War of 1812 , archaeologist Kevin J. Crisman and his fellow contributors examine sixteen different examples of 1812-era naval and commercial ...shipbuilding. They range from four small prewar vessels to four 16- or 20-gun brigs, three warships of much greater size, a steamboat hull converted into an armed schooner, two gunboats, and two postwar schooners. Despite their differing degrees of preservation and archaeological study, each vessel reveals something about how its creators sought the best balance of strength, durability, capacity, stability, speed, weatherliness, and seaworthiness for the anticipated naval struggle on the lakes along the US-Canadian border. The underwater archaeology reported here has guided a new approach to understanding the events of 1812–15, one that blends the evidence in contemporary documents and images with a wealth of details derived from objects lost, discarded, and otherwise left behind. This heavily illustrated volume balances scholarly findings with lively writing, interjecting the adventure of working on shipwrecks and archaeological finds into the investigation and interpretation of a war that continues to attract interest two centuries after it was fought. >
On 2 July 1812, Captain David Porter raised a banner on the USS Essex proclaiming 'a free trade and sailors rights', thus creating a political slogan that explained the War of 1812. Free trade ...demanded the protection of American commerce, while sailors' rights insisted that the British end the impressment of seamen from American ships. Repeated for decades in Congress and in taverns, the slogan reminds us today that the second war with Great Britain was not a mistake. It was a contest for the ideals of the American Revolution bringing together both the high culture of the Enlightenment to establish a new political economy and the low culture of the common folk to assert the equality of humankind. Understanding the War of 1812 and the motto that came to explain it – free trade and sailors' rights – allows us to better comprehend the origins of the American nation.
This article considers the influence of burials and memorials to colonial soldiers from an earlier era on contemporary social and cultural landscapes in Canada. Through the example of a landscape ...centered on Smith's Knoll, a burial ground for war dead from the British-American War of 1812, it explores the process of necro-settlement: the strengthening of settler colonial claims to land based on the development of complex, meaning-laden landscapes of dead and memory. This article consists of three parts: The first situates geographical studies of deathscapes alongside theories about settler colonialism through intersecting discourses of land use. The second includes a settler colonial microhistorical geography of Smith's Knoll and the local deathscape that surrounds it. The third section draws on this case study to reveal new perspectives on the role of burial and memorial in settler colonial place-making and the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples.
This book brings together a variety of interesting perspectives on the circumstances and effects of the war in 1812, offering a range of insights, from an exploration of the role religion played in ...the conflict to an investigation of low literature of the time reacted to it. The book is opened by a contribution from Adam Rothman, who examines the concept of the paracolonial republic to highlight that the US in 1812 was surrounded by monarchical colonial powers and used imperial means against its indigenous populations. In the second essay, Tangi Villerbu explores the way in which the Catholic Church set out to organize the space for its own development west of the Appalachian Mountains in the context of a continental war. Following this, John Dickinson explores the heart of the early hours of the conflict in his account of the northern borderland and the new sense of itself Canada gained after successfully defending its territory against US invasion. Using biography as an efficient type of narrative to account for the complex situations of Native American groups during the war, Sheri Shuck-Hall focuses on the fascinating character of William Weatherford,who joined the traditionalists despite his strong cultural and economic interests among the Muscogee/Creek metis class. This volume also contains an essay by Nelly André on revolutionary women in South America. She points out that too much emphasis on a military-political definition of history has pushed women into the corners of national narratives. Her essay presents a few of these remarkable, sometimes forgotten, heroes. American literature had not yet fully emerged in its own right in 1812. As Ed White demonstrates in his essay, novel production at the time was scant and failed to provide satisfactory accounts of the war. Instead, as the author argues, only poetry was able to keep pace with
the flow of events and create national representations. In his essay, Marco Sioli considers the events of the period in their cultural dimensions. He looks at the ways in which the press shaped the perceptions of the war and helped devise a more affirmed national identity despite the poor record of American military deeds. The volume closes with inisghts into another genre that had a major impact on the discussions about going to war against the British Empire: the sermon. Lucia Bergamasco's careful and close reading of such texts provides the reader with the arguments that shook the nation, such as sectional antagonism, slavery, and political and moral reformation.
En el tránsito de 1820 a 1822 Nueva España pasó, de ser una colonia de la monarquía española, a formar parte del sistema liberal doceañista, tras la sanción de la Constitución de 1812 en mayo de ...1820. Así, en febrero de 1821, se inició un proceso independentista que acabó con el Acta de Independencia en septiembre de ese mismo año. Este germen del Estado nación mexicano se consolidará en el Congreso del Imperio en 1822. En el tránsito político se entrecruzaron la Constitución de 1812, normativas, leyes, decretos, planes, tratados y actores, que, a pesar de ser buena parte de ellos herederos del liberalismo doceañista, al articularse confirieron una singularidad nacional al Estado mexicano.
Sin embargo, la falta de una legislación ad hoc para el nuevo país, los intereses de grupo y la urgencia de establecer un marco normativo propio del nuevo Estado mexicano dejaron un amplio margen de interpretación y de debate en la aplicación de las leyes, tal y como lo muestran los actores involucrados en este estudio. Todo ello hizo más complejo el orden que se pretendía establecer en medio de un escenario inestable, tanto en el interior como en el exterior, acentuado por la guerra de los últimos años.
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