A Good Answer: Inventing the American Structure

A wealthy narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the boys who formed its political future

Although the American Revolution is widely known as our nation’s founding story, the years instantly following the conflict—when our authorities was a catastrophe and the nation was in a horrible disaster—had been in reality essentially the most essential in establishing the nation’s independence. The group of males who traveled to Philadelphia in the summertime of 1787 had no concept what sort of historical past their assembly would make. However all their concepts, arguments, and compromises—from the creation of the Structure itself, article by article, to the insistence that it stay a residing, evolving doc—laid the muse for a authorities that has surpassed the founders’ best hopes. Revisiting all the unique historic paperwork of the interval and drawing from her deep information of eighteenth-century politics, Carol Berkin opens up the hearts and minds of America’s founders, revealing the problems they confronted, the instances they lived in, and their humble expectations of success.