Thanks for your kind words. I am a teacher trying to find full time work and I like to write my own materials. The texts I use in the classroom are often more fact based but I am trying to develop other aspects. I use the blog to "practice" writing, to focus on generating interest in a subject and demonstrate how past events influenced others and are relevant to today. These aspects of history draw student interest which makes learning the facts less of a chore. It's also been interesting to learn how to build and maintain a website, which I also hope to use to engage students in writing their own blogs on subjects we cover. I try to post 1-3 posts a week and have about 35 articles (I started in October, 2017). I also post daily content in anniversaries of important events and births and deaths. Rather than just listing tons of events, births or deaths, I often try to focus on the most important and provide a little context. If you go to "Today in History" and "Famous Births and Deaths" you will find this content. I also post a highlighted event, birth and death on the homepage and try to add a little art and culture at the bottom. For example, today is Johnny Cash's birthday so there is a link to "Folsom County Blues" from youtube at the bottom of the page. I have posted 3 other articles here and will post more without flooding the site all at once. Thanks again for checking out my site. I hope you will come back.
It's a good idea to not flood the site. Gobeckli Tepe is a confounding and exciting find. I hate the way you minimize the other fronts of the war of 1812 but hey that's the prevailing narrative. The British were beating their breast and tearing their hair at the early string of navel defeats they faced. The lads who served as midshipmen under Edward Preble in the Barbary conflict had a strong early showing before they got buttoned down. No doubt that America had lost the Atlantic Coast but not before they shook the British Admiralty's confidence and foreshadowed the navel powerhouse that America could become. The northern front looked a lot different after Perry's string of victories. I'd say the fate of the northern campaign looked uncertain at the end of the war, which is a pretty good place to be for the upstart Americans. At the very least the northern campaign didn't go as smoothly as the British thought it would.
I agree with you that I neglected the Northern campaigns. I originally wrote about Perry, Old Ironsides and Canada but I cut it because the thesis of the article was that Britain and the US emerged from this era in position to become world powers. It would have almost doubled the length of the article without significantly advancing the central point. If I had been writing for a class of students, I would have included it. I often read that Perry's victories ensured that the US maintained control of the Midwest and Great Lakes. We may disagree on this point but I doubt the US would have given up the territory and I'm not sure the British cared enough about the region to make a concerted effort. The British ended the war because the need to impress US sailors and prevent commerce with France ended. They could have shipped a big army over here if they really had designs on American territory. Maybe they would have but the British people were exhausted after 20 years of war. They also had a much more lucrative new possession, India which would require a lot of attention and effort. Even if the British had taken part of the north Midwest, the land would have been populated by Americans who likely would have pulled a Texas on the English. In my opinion, the real importance of the Great Lakes campaign was William Henry Harrison's decisive victory over Tecumseh and permanently breaking Native American resistance in the region. Tippecanoe's campaign is probably worthy of its own article. When I started this blog I worried I would run out of ideas. It's been the opposite, I can't get to all the subjects I want to cover. Here's a "what if" for you: what if the English had taken some or much of the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes? There may not have been a Civil War or a very different one. It would have taken a lot longer for slave states to become a minority . That weird compromise in the Senate would have lasted much longer.
I always wonder what the battle for Lake Ontario would have been like. So much would have hung on the when it happened and what ships made it on the water by that time. Ships of the line fighting on the Great Lakes would have been an crazy thing. Control of Erie and Ontario would have been a pretty nice advantage for the U.S. war effort. The battle to build on Ontario is one of the more exciting stories of a front in which no real fighting took place. I have to admit that I'm a total fan boy of the early U.S. navy, I'm sure it bias's my view on the conflict. If you read a bit of the history, the extent to which the British were gobsmacked at the drubbing they received early in the naval conflict paints a much different picture to standard "Brits kicked the Yankees asses stone cold on the sea front" story of today. It's been almost two decades since I devoured every thing I could on the Barbary and 1812 war's at sea but the excitement of these early years of the U.S. navy are still my favorite era and theaters of military history.
Have you read Teddy Roosevelt's book on the 1812 Navy? I have not but I have heard that it is still referenced and considered authoritative. The build up story is a good one which probably deserves its own post. Have you considered writing an article of your own, that would be a pretty good subject for hubski. You are correct in that the surprising early American victories were shocking and embarrassing to the British, but with only a few warships, the US could not hope to defeat the British in anything but isolated engagements. The British blockade had a real tangible effect on the North. Yankees started building their own factories to create finished goods. On my "Today in History" section for February 22nd, I mentioned the opening of the first cotton to cloth factory in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1813 which began to counteract the embargo. I read a really good book 2 years ago about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the US. Small manufacturers in NY and Mass began producing finished goods for settlers moving west. The Erie Canal and Fulton's steamboat played big roles in developing intra-US trade. February 16th was the anniversary of Decatur sneaking into the Tripoli Harbor to destroy the captured USS Philadelphia. Decatur is on my list of people to write about. He was a 19th century superhero.
Decatur is a stud. I always thought they should make a major motion picture out of his part of Tripoli campaign. I've done quite a bit of reading about Theodore and more reading about the early U.S. Navy but I've never read his book on the U.S. Navy, seems like an over site. You got me poking around my library where I found Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812-1814. I remember it being a good read. Maybe I'll crack it open but I got a pile of stuff that that I've not read that I intend too read ahead of it. I don't seem to get much reading done between work, family and the internet now a days. I've never thought about history writing. I've only taken two history classes in my life, Ancient Greece and Economics and neither involved much writing. Always a consumer, never a producer.
I have two young children as well which makes a blog a luxury. You may find that writing about a subject changes your perception. Re-formulating ideas in your head onto paper creates connections that may not have occurred to you otherwise. I consider writing to be part of the learning process. Without publishing, try to write a one page summary of a topic, any topic, and see what you think. What would be interesting, write a summary of something you remember from Lords of the Lake and then read about it to see if you remember it the way its written.