The War of 1812: A Complete Chronology with Biographies of 63 General Officers

Hannings's (Forts of the United States: An Historical Dictionary, 16th Through 19th Centuries; Every Day of the Civil War: A Chronological Encyclopedia) detailed chronology covers more than just the war years: 1803 and 1804 are covered in three short entries, and the bulk of the coverage runs from 1805 through 1816. An eight-page introduction sets the stage for the conflict with a recounting of the political situation and military actions in Europe between the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Individual date entries in the body of the text vary from a couple of sentences to several paragraphs, with headings in bold separating multiple activities under a single date. Entry headings give the day of the week as well as the date, although some entries are reasonably given more general time frames, such as "Spring" or "July." These are followed by short biographies of 63 general officers, a complete list of U.S. Army and militia generals, and the text of five documents (Madison's "1812 War Message to Congress," a select list of vessels taken by American privateers during the war years, Hull's proclamation to the people of Canada, Brock's response to Hull's proclamation, and Boyle's proclamation). The font in the encyclopedia is unfortunately too small for comfortable reading, and the addition of several large maps at the beginning of the volume would have been welcome. A more serious flaw is the failure to link the extensive bibliography to the text to indicate the sources used for each entry or section. This lack of direct attribution greatly limits the reference and scholarly value of this work and relegates it to that of leisure reading. Further, the few documents are handled inconsistently (the text of Hull's proclamation is referred to in the related entry, but Brock's isn't).