"Border Troubles in the War of 1812" exhibition January 4, 2012

Today most Americans remember the War of 1812 for inspiring Francis Scott Key to write “The Star Spangled Banner.” Many of the conflict’s most familiar events—the battle of New Orleans, impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, and the British assault on Washington D.C.—took place far away from the Great Lakes. Yet the war stretched through the United States’ northwestern territory to Fort Dearborn and beyond, and sparked fighting among Indians, Canadians, the British, and Americans. This exhibition refocuses our attention on the conflict in the area then known as the West: firsthand accounts of warfare; territorial struggles between Indian nations and the United States; an East Coast print culture that romanticized wartime life in the Great Lakes region; and representations of the war in textbooks and other histories of the United States.

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