The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

 
 
From the publishers:
 
In this book, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor tells the story of a war that redefined North America. During the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought in a northern borderland to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British empire contain, divide, and ruin the shaky American republic?

During the war, both sides struggled to sustain armies in a northern land of immense forests, vast lakes, and stark seasonal changes. After fighting each other to a standstill, the Americans and the British concluded that they could safely share the continent along a border that favored the United States.

A vivid narrative of an often brutal (and sometimes comic) war that reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
 
Read a review of this book by Ivan Lett in Open Letters Monthly.
 
Read a review of this book by Gordon S. Wood, “The War We Lost – and Won” in The New York Review of Books.