I thought “the Dawn’s Early Light” by Walter Lord was pretty good at telling what a close call young America had.
The eye-opener for me of what went down in The Battle of New Orleans was the fairly recent book, “Patriotic Fire” by Winston Groom. Andrew Jackson sent the remains of the Commander of the British Forces back to England, pickled, in a barrel. That dude had come here, fresh from flamboyant victories over Napoleon, to pay back the upstart uncouth “americans” for their pesky “revolution”. The book would lead one to believe that Andrew Jackson single-handedly, finally and emphatically made the American Revolution stick.
That was a great book. The man is a native here so it was particularly interesting, but he is most famous of course for his excellent “Night to Remember”, another of my pet topics.