ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS
1789
1789
George Washington and the Founders Create America
ISBN: 9781538197851Couldn't load pickup availability
"[Historian Allen] recreates in this meticulous and fast-moving posthumous account the events of the pivotal year 1789 in America. It’s a superb distillation of a complex moment in U.S. history.”— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
1789: George Washington and the Founders Create Americadraws 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.
By Thomas B Allen
Imprint: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS
Release Date:
Format: PAPERBACK
Pages: 400
Prologue: Eleven States Create a Nation
1 The Great Cause
2 The Specter of a King
3 The Reluctant President
4 Out with the Old
5 A New Government Awakens
6 “Now a King”
7 Etiquette Advice for the President
8 “All Is Bare Creation”
9 The Constitution as Blueprint
10 Counting We the People
11 America’s “Other Persons”
12 A Tub Full of Rights
13 “He Shall Have Power”
14 Stricken Washington, Fearful Nation
15 Washington Gets a Bastille Key
16 Seeing America’s Farms and Factories
17 Many Pirates—And No Navy
18 The Second Session: Hope and Angst
19 On the Frontier, Spies and Plots
20 Toward an American Language
Epilogue: In Rising Glory
Appendices
1 The “Correct”
Constitution of the United States
2 Inside the Dozen: the Bill of Rights
3 A Timeline of the Founding of the United States and the Federal Government
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Bibliographic Sources
Index
About the Author
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Author Bio
Thomas B. Allen, esteemed and prolific author of numerous history books, including Tories: Fighting for the King in Americas First Civil War (2010), Remember Valley Forge (2007), and George Washington, Spymaster (2004), lived for many years in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside the nations capital. He was a frequent contributor to Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Military History Quarterly, Military History, Naval History, the U.S. Naval Institutes Proceedings, and other publications.