The War of 1812 isn’t an event most of us get excited about. The conflict between the US and Great Britain lasted almost 3 years, but like a lot of sequels, it didn’t live up to the original. When the war was over, little had changed for either country’s place in the world, and most of the grievances that began the war remained unsettled. So aside from the burning of the White House and Congress, the rise of Andrew Jackson as an American icon, the writing of the national anthem, and the demise of the first American political party system, not a lot happened. In this episode, Bob and Ben speak with Don Hickey of Wayne State College to talk about the war of 1812, its impact on the US, and why so few people today remember such a significant moment in American history.
Dr. Don Hickey is Professor of History at Wayne State College. Called “the Dean of 1812 scholarship” by The New Yorker, he has written 10 books and over a hundred articles on the War of 1812, including The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Bicentennial Edition (University of Illinois Press, 2012).
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There is no question that Donald Trump’s approach to foreign affairs is nothing we’ve seen from the Presidents who preceded him. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, Mark Landler argued that the Trump Administration has broken a 70-year tradition in America’s foreign policy. Whether this is an abrogation of America’s responsibility to the globe or a necessary change for the good of the country requires knowledge of what came before, so Bob & Ben caught up with Whittier College’s Joyce Kaufman to learn about the origins of American diplomacy and the reasons that the US became so heavily involved abroad. It turns out America’s approach to foreign relations in 2018 may have a lot in common with earlier periods of American history.
Dr. Joyce Kaufman is an expert on International Relations in the Department of Political Science at at Whittier College, where she has taught for more than 3 decades. She is the author of multiple books, including A Concise History of US Foreign Policy (4th edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). She previously served as a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense (1977-79). Visit Dr. Kaufman’s faculty page for more on her work and publications.
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