1789: George Washington and the Founders Create America

1789: George Washington and the Founders Create America draws on hundreds of sources to paint a vivid portrait of the new nation, setting out to show the world at large that a new-and very American-form of government was calling itself into being. “No future session of Congress will ever have so arduous and weighty a charge on their hands,” the New York Gazette observed in summer 1789. “No examples to imitate, and no striking historical facts on which to ground their decisions-All is bare creation.”

The Constitution had been written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But 1789 was the year the government it described-albeit only in the broadest of terms-had to be brought into being.

Veteran journalist Thomas B. Allen brings decades of experience and a gifted storyteller's eye to the long-hidden history of how George Washington and the Founders set the federal government into motion.