Deadline Now: The War of 1812 Bicentennial Friday, March 23,
2012 Deadline Now examines the enduring legacy of the War of
1812. Key events and battles of the War occurred in Northwest
Ohio and Southeast Michigan. Jack Lessenberry's guests will be
Patricia N. Williamsen, Executive Director of the Ohio
Humanities Council, as well as Fort Meigs Director Rick Finch,
and Randall Buchman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
at Defiance College. Here are Jack Lessenberry's "Final
Thoughts" for this edition of Deadline Now: Few other nations
took the United States very seriously when the War of 1812
began. We then consisted of a band of eighteen mainly rural
states and territories, which had, all told, maybe seven and
half million people, all of them at least a month by ship from
the main centers of western civilization. Nobody was too sure
whether this experiment in democracy would last, and to some
extent, our fledgling nation wasn’t taken especially seriously.
When we declared war on Great Britain less tha