The forgetting began almost as soon as the last shot was fired, and it has been going on ever since.

Working hard to winnow my many thousands of books, I am constantly sorting through stacks, trying to find something that I bought in duplicate, or of such narrow interest that I am unlikely to read it, or finding a book which fundamentally is not especially interesting. I am getting better at this but the yield rate is exceptionally low.

As an indication of my weak will, Home Life in Colonial Days written in 1898 by Alice Morse Earle continues to survive the cut. I tell myself that really, if a stranger just read a few passages, they would see how interesting it is. I tell myself that, and believe it, but I have to acknowledge its improbability. As a consequence, lack of space continues pressing in on me.

In pursuit of this fool's errand of fewer books, which, after some hours, has only yielded half a dozen books for dispossal, I come across Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky. Really, just how deep is my interest in the War of 1812? Maybe this one can go.

I open the covers, usually a bad sign in terms of achieving disposal. The first two paragraphs speak directly to The great knack of unremembering which I just posted two or three hours ago. Immediate salience. OK, it stays.

“Many wars have been called “the forgotten war”: those words have become a catchphrase much beloved of military historians seeking to excuse their obsession with obscurity. But rarely was a war—or at least large parts of a war—forgotten with such swiftness, and such mutual determination, as the War of 1812. America and Britain both had things they wanted to forget, and forget quickly, about this often brutal three-year fight that raged across half a globe, from the wilderness of the northwestern forests to the capital cities of Canada and the United States, from the seas off Chile to the mouth of the English Channel. The forgetting began almost as soon as the last shot was fired, and it has been going on ever since.

It would be decades before the war even had a name; until the 1850s this war that left thirty thousand dead, that pushed the fledgling American republic to the brink of bankruptcy and secession, that brought down some of the loftiest military reputations of the Revolutionary generation to ruin and disgrace, that saw hundreds of American citizens executed by firing squad for desertion, was most often just called “the late war” or “the late war with Great Britain.” “The War of 1812” came into widespread use only after the Mexican War of 1846–48 usurped the place of the “late war” in American memory. It proved a memorable phrase, yet like “the late war,” it sidestepped any memory of why the war had been fought, or even whom it had been fought against.