Baltimore at war with itself.
A newspaper press smashed. A city jail invaded. Revolutionary War General James M. Lingan murdered by a political mob.
Enter the Baltimore exhibition →The war no one explains as one story
1812
The United States declares war on the most powerful empire on Earth.
The fighting will stretch from Detroit to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake and Gulf, crossing Indigenous homelands and communities already caught in older struggles over land, empire, slavery, trade, and sovereignty.
An American bookend
Between these two nights lies the War of 1812.
Baltimore at war with an empire.
Earthworks, militia, laborers, bomb ships, rockets, and an invading British army stopped outside the city.
Read the two years together →Choose your depth
One war. Four ways in.
5 min
The whole shape
Causes, campaigns, peace, and the unequal aftermath in one concentrated account.
Read the overview →20 minThe connected account
Fifteen movements preserve chronology, perspective, and consequence without becoming a book.
Read the medium version →WholeThe complete narrative
19 connected movements, from the world before the war to the memories created after it.
See all chapters →FollowThe moving war
Scrub through events across the lakes, Atlantic, Chesapeake, Gulf, Pacific, and negotiating table.
Open the map →New · evidence laboratory
Five famous claims.
No easy verdicts.
Follow each story back to its earliest identifiable trace. Separate documented elements from possible ones, see what contradicts the familiar version, and track how uncertainty hardened into memory.
Open the case files→Doors into the story
What happens next?
01→03→06→10→14→15→16→17→
Why War?
A divided republic chooses war against the greatest naval power on Earth.
Invading Canada
The easy conquest collapses at Detroit and Queenston Heights.
War on the Lakes
Inland shipyards build fleets because water is the only reliable road.
Southern Borderlands
Muscogee civil war, Spanish Florida, slavery, and expansion overlap.
Washington Burns
The capital falls; the Chesapeake campaign is not finished.
Baltimore Holds
A city once divided confronts an army and fleet.
Peace
Negotiators restore the map and abandon the buffer-state demand.
New Orleans
The treaty is signed in Europe. Peace has not reached Louisiana.
Interactive historical systems
Time, pressure,
supply, people.
Choose a day and ask what news had arrived. Carry a treaty across the Atlantic. Tighten the blockade. Build a lake fleet. Follow a person through the uneven archive.
Each system exposes its evidence and assumptions instead of hiding them behind a game score.
News & discoveries
1812 Today
Discoveries, research, and reporting on the war and what it left behind.
AddedArchives & scholarship
Newly accessible letters illuminate the Creek War
University of North Alabama Archives & Special CollectionsResearch · Open access
The University of North Alabama has made indexed transcriptions of General John Coffee’s correspondence available through its digital repository, with an updated finding aid and an index of people, places, and events. Letters from 1813–1814 concern Coffee’s Tennessee cavalry and mounted gunmen; individual records describe marches and crossings of the Tennessee River. A March 1816 letter addresses the boundary contemplated by the Treaty of Fort Jackson.
AddedResearch & remembrance
An unknown sailor in Mystic is remembered by name
The New York Times · Malia MendezReporting · Subscription may be required
A grave in Mystic, Connecticut, marked only as an unknown sailor from HMS Terror has a name: William Adamson. Malia Mendez follows Jon Fuller’s effort to mark the burial and the research by Grace Cleere and Roger Hutchins that connected it to a British Admiralty muster roll. A named plaque was dedicated in August 2026, with one of Adamson’s descendants present.
AddedMuseums & exhibitions
A new photographic view of Old Ironsides
USS Constitution MuseumMuseum announcement · Open access
The USS Constitution Museum announced Exploring Old Ironsides, an exhibition of Greg M. Cooper’s photographs of the ship. Drawn from more than two decades of work, the photographs concentrate on details and viewpoints visitors might miss. The exhibition also introduced a renewed gallery in the former Navy Yard pump house.
The war was never owned by one national memory.
SovereigntyFreedom seekingHousehold laborCitizenshipOccupationMemory
Choose a perspective pathway →