What So Proudly We Hailed

With distrust between the political parties running deep and Congress divided, the government of the United States goes to war.The war is waged without adequately preparing the means to finance it or readying suitable contingency plans to contend with its unanticipated complications.The executive branch suffers from managerial confusion and in-fighting.The military invades a foreign country, expecting to be greeted as liberators, but encounters stiff, unwelcome resistance.The conflict drags on longer than predicted. It ends rather inconclusively?or so it seems in its aftermath. Sound familiar? This all happened two hundred years ago. What So Proudly We Hailed looks at the War of 1812 in part through the lens of today's America.On the bicentennial of that formative yet largely forgotten period in U.S. history, this provocative book asks: What did Americans learn?and not learn?from the experience?What instructive parallels and distinctions can be drawn with more recent events?How did it