The Civil War of 1812

From the perspective of 18th-century Great Britain, any individual born on British territory was a Briton for life. Hence the British viewed American citizens as subjects despite the American Revolution. Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize recipient Taylor (history, Univ. of California, Davis; William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic) uses this perspective to cast the War of 1812 as a civil war between Great Britain's loyal subjects in Canada and the Revolutionary Republicans in the United States. Rather than writing a comprehensive history of the conflict, he focuses on the borderlands between Montreal and Detroit, where much of the fighting occurred and where conflicting loyalties and agendas most vividly came to the fore. The author astutely illuminates how a war intended to settle what form of government would prevail in North America in fact ended as a stalemate.