1789: George Washington and the Founders Create America

Historian Allen (Tories), 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. (Oct.)