1789 : George Washington and the Founders Create America

"[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.