In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, Americans celebrated the War of 1812 as America’s ‘Second War of Independence’, in which Americans allegedly repelled the former mother country’s attempts to subdue its lost colonies in North America back into the British imperial system. (1) These competing perspectives are the result of the different functions the Anglo-American conflict served in their respective nations’ historical master narratives. Americans believe they gave their former mother country a good drumming, Canadians pride themselves in turning back ‘the massed might of the United States’, and ‘the English are happiest of all, because they don’t even know it happened’. Stacey once remarked that the War of 1812 is ‘an episode in history that makes everybody happy, because everybody interprets it differently’. This is an updated version (December 2014) of a piece originally published in 2013, which extends the coverage of the review to include some more recent works on 1812.
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