The First Congress, Fergus M. Bordewich
The First Congress, Fergus M. Bordewich
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The First Congress
How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government

Author: Fergus M. Bordewich

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Unabridged: 12 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/12/2016


Synopsis

The First Congress was the most important in U.S. history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed—as many at the time feared it would—it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.

The Constitution was a broad set of principles. It was left to the members of the First Congress and President George Washington to create the machinery that would make the government work. Fortunately, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others less well known today, rose to the occasion. During two years of often fierce political struggle, they passed the first ten amendments to the Constitution; they resolved bitter regional rivalries to choose the site of the new national capital; they set in place the procedure for admitting new states to the union; and much more. But the First Congress also confronted some issues that remain to this day: the conflict between states' rights and the powers of national government; the proper balance between legislative and executive power; the respective roles of the federal and state judiciaries; and funding the central government.

About Fergus M. Bordewich

Journalist Fergus M. Bordewich has written on American history as well as human rights and other issues for the New York Times, Smithsonian, American Heritage, the Atlantic Monthly, Reader's Digest, and other periodicals. He is the author of Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century; My Mother's Ghost; and Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jean

The author utilized the First Federal Congress Project to write this book. The Project has cataloged nearly all the diaries, letters and newspaper accounts relating to the proceedings of the Congress of 1789-1791. As we discovered with Bordewich’s book, the project is a gold mine for historians. The......more

Goodreads review by Grumpus

This was another freebie, a First Reads win. As one interested in this time period in US history, I've read much about the players and the Revolutionary War itself, but found little about how our government actually came into being. Nobody was sure what to do, there was no template. Everything was a......more