1789

Thomas B. Allen, esteemed and prolific author of numerous history books, including Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War (2010), Remember Valley Forge (2007), and George Washington, Spymaster (2004), lived for many years in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital. He was a frequent contributor to Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Military History Quarterly, Military History,Naval History, the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, and other publications.

Historian Allen, who died in 2018, recreates in this meticulous and fast-moving posthumous account the events of the pivotal year 1789 in America. (“Everything that happened in that epochal year would shape and empower the history that has followed it,” he writes.) Those happenings included, most notably, the implementation of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the first presidential election, the first legislative session of Congress, and the emergence of political parties. Allen profiles such famous founders as George Washington and John Adams alongside more obscure figures like Lt. Col. David Humphreys, one of Washington’s aides, who was the first to enlist Black troops for the Continental Army and was later tapped to draft Washington’s first inaugural address. Allen’s frequent flashbacks to the years immediately preceding 1789 make clear that the unification of separate states into one country was anything but inevitable, with many Americans suspicious of a federal government that could infringe on their rights. As Allen outlines the “threads of unification [which] would bind the states together in a powerful transcontinental nation,” he casts a wide net—addressing, for example, how in 1789 Britain took its first steps toward abolishing slavery, which would eventually have massive ramifications in its fledgling former colony. It’s a superb distillation of a complex moment in U.S. history.

• Prologue: Eleven States Create a Nation1 The Great Cause2 The Specter of a King3 The Reluctant President4 Out with the Old5 A New Government Awakens6 “Now a King”7 Etiquette Advice for the President8 “All Is Bare Creation”9 The Constitution as Blueprint10 Counting We the People11 America’s “Other Persons”12 A Tub Full of Rights13 “He Shall Have Power”14 Stricken Washington, Fearful Nation15 Washington Gets a Bastille Key16 Seeing America’s Farms and Factories17 Many Pirates—And No Navy18 The Second Session: Hope and Angst19 On the Frontier, Spies and Plots20 Toward an American LanguageEpilogue: In Rising GloryAppendices1 The “Correct”Constitution of the United States2 Inside the Dozen: the Bill of Rights3 A Timeline of the Founding of the United States and the Federal GovernmentAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyBibliographic SourcesIndexAbout the Author