American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Alan Taylor, will explore the war in the Canadian-American borderland which threatened either to absorb Canada into the United States or to rupture the American union. By instead fighting to a standstill, the belligerents produced a surprising burst of patriotism on both sides and an enduring coexistence.
This program is the keynote address for the Conference on the War of 1812 held at AAS on October 13, 2012. This daylong conference will look at the military, political, and cultural implications of the War of 1812. Saturday's program will feature a plenary talk by William Fowler of Northeastern University and concurrent breakout sessions on such topics as: the war at sea; the war in an international context; the culture of the period as expressed in the music and images of the time; the war's impact on American politics; and how the war impacted the development of Canadian culture among others.
Alan Taylor, Professor of History at UC Davis, specializes in early American History. He won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prize for his micro history of Cooperstown, New York entitled William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995). He is also the author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: the Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 1760-1820 (1990); American Colonies, (2001); Writing Early American History, (2005); The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2006); and The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (2010). Taylor is also a frequent contributor to The New Republic.
