Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence
Written by A. J. Langguth
Narrated by Grover Gardner
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
This dramatic account of the War of 1812 fills a surprising gap in the popular literature of the nation's formative years. It is this war, followed closely on the War of Independence, that established the young nation as a permanent power and proved its claim to Manifest Destiny.
Full of fascinating characters-Presidents Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, and the future President Andrew Jackson, as well as Dolley Madison, Sam Houston, the great Indian chieftain Tecumseh, Francis Scott Key, Davey Crockett, and Oliver Perry, among others-Langguth's riveting account covers a vast panorama of battles, from the American sacking of Toronto and the British burning of the White House and the Capitol, to the thrilling war at sea and on the Great Lakes and the final spectacular American victory at New Orleans.
Union 1812 will take its place on the history shelf of essential books on the young nation, alongside Langguth's Patriots.
A. J. Langguth
A. J. Langguth (1933–2014) was the author of eight books of nonfiction and three novels. After Lincoln marks his fourth book in a series that began in 1988 with Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. He served as a Saigon bureau chief for the New York Times, after covering the Civil Rights movement for the newspaper. Langguth taught for three decades at the University of Southern California and retired in 2003 as emeritus professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
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Reviews for Union 1812
39 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A popular history of the War of 1812 from the perspective of the people who lived it. Written by a retired journalism professor it is very readable. I enjoyed it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very disappointing at first, until I realized the author was not writing a history of The War of 1812, but connected biographies of the participants. It’s a good thing, too, because the historical background is pretty miserable – a few large scale maps in the front matter (which makes it very hard to figure out what was going on around Detroit) and lots of minor but annoying factual errors (Dolley Madison is described as entertaining “by gaslight” in the White House, the Constitution is credited with a speed of “12 ½ knots per hour”, and rifles are repeatedly confused with muskets). Fortunately, the biographies are not bad at all. Author A. J. Langguth starts out with return of Washington to Mount Vernon at the end of his second presidential term, and tracks the careers of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Zebulon Pike, Madison, Tecumseh, William Hull, Isaac Brock, Isaac Hull, John Armstrong, Oliver Perry, William Henry Harrison, and Dolley Madison through the war and well afterward; plus throwing in various other characters as they come up (I never realized Davey Crocket fought in the War of 1812, or that Sam Houston spent his adolescence as a Cherokee Indian brave (a telling quote from Houston is that he would never forget his days of “wandering along the bank of streams, side by side with some Indian maiden, sheltered by the deep woods, making love and reading the Iliad.” I never realized all the uses of the Iliad before.)This would make an excellent companion to a more conventional military history; it’s one thing to read of the American collapse at Detroit but another to have the details of the characters of William Hull and Isaac Brock at hand. (Brock comes across as far and away the best general on the Canadian front, and if he hadn’t been shot down by an American rifleman at Queenston while leading his troops the war might have ended very differently; we’d all be speaking Canadian now.)
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Starts with a brief history of the years between the revolution (1783), the reforming of the Constitution to the factors that lead up to the War of 1812. Not very put together summary of the major battles of the war and then a really brief "what did they do next" section as it takes the major players from 1815 to 1860. This is the barest scratch of an important conflict and this book is missing alot - no so much the details - but the "why".