ABSTRACT
Textbook writers in England and Wales can scarcely be expected to devote extensive space to such a minor event in Britain’s long history as the War of 1812, yet their indifference to that conflict and the historical distortions that result prove them guilty of ‘bias by omission’ to an alarming degree. That war is not even mentioned in several texts; in the remainder it is described in passages varying from a sentence to a page or two. To say of this conflict only that Wellington was handi capped because ‘the best of his veterans had been sent to fight in a war which had broken out between Britain and the United States of America’, or that ‘this led to a short, ignominious war (1812-1814) between England and the United States, which as a neutral country objected to Britain’s claim to board and search her ships’, is to surrender to national bias as flagrant as that of the flag-waving superpatriot. A student reader is left with the impression that an event of major significance to one nation is so insignificant to another that it can be shrugged away with a condescending phrase. Another writer who
dismisses the war as ‘ the American scuffle5 is equally guilty of half-way vision.
