front cover of Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814
Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814
Larry L. Nelson
Michigan State University Press, 2001

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
     Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed. 

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front cover of To Your Posts!
To Your Posts!
Fort Meigs in the War of 1812 through the Voices of Those Who Fought There
Larry L. Nelson
Michigan State University Press, 2025
To Your Posts! Fort Meigs in the War of 1812 through the Voices of Those Who Fought There recounts the history of Fort Meigs, a U.S. military garrison built on the outermost reaches of Ohio’s northwestern frontier during the War of 1812. Troops commanded by William Henry Harrison erected the fort in the late winter and early spring of 1813. Built at the foot of the Maumee River Rapids, the site of present-day Perrysburg in Wood County, the post successfully withstood two determined sieges by allied British, Canadian, and Native forces later that year. Those victories, resulting in the garrison’s continued American occupation throughout 1815, contributed significantly to the United States’ eventual successes in the Detroit Theater at the end of the war. Using numerous primary sources including letters, diaries, and other documents from the period, many published here for the first time, To Your Posts! tells the story of Fort Meigs through the voices of those who served at the post during the War of 1812.
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