News correspondent Cokie Roberts reveals the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals such as Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Revolution, and featuring a cast of legendary characters, The Hamilton Affair tells the sweeping, tumultuous, true story of Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, from passionate and tender beginnings to his fateful duel on the banks of the Hudson River. Hamilton was a bastard and orphan, raised in the Caribbean and desperate for legitimacy, who became one of the American Revolution’s most dashing—and...

An introduction to the first 32 years of the United States' history after the Revolutionary War, from the Treaty of Paris to the War of 1812.

The world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations-France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain-lay interlocked. France, a nation bankrupted by its support for the American Revolution, wrestled to seize the prize of citizenship from the ruins of the old order. Disaster loomed for the United States, too, as it struggled, in the face of...

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading...

The story of Ian Cameron and Seona, a former slave, continues. Seona and their son Gabriel are now living in Boston. Ian has stayed at Mountain Laurel, trying to make a life there with his wife Judith. But when tragedy strikes, Ian decides to return north with his young daughter. When Ian has the opportunity to obtain land near the frontier settlement of Shiloh, New York, he seizes the chance to make a new life with those he loves.

When the United States government passed the Bill of Rights in 1791, its uncompromising protection of speech and of the press were unlike anything the world had ever seen before. But by 1798, the once-dazzling young republic of the United States was on the verge of collapse: partisanship gripped the weak federal government, British seizures threatened American goods and men on the high seas, and war with France seemed imminent as its own democratic...

Americans like to believe that the Constitution miraculously brought the United States into being, as though the framers established, in one stroke, the nation we know today. Yet when George Washington delivered his First Inaugural Address on April 30, 1789, he expressed worry about the challenges that lay ahead. He was right to be concerned: the existence of the new nation was anything but secure. Without the support of the American people, after...