Includes material on John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington

Explores America's hidden history in the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the most tumultuous but overlooked periods in the nation's early history. In the dramatic period from 1800 through 1850, the United States emerged from its inauspicious beginning as a newborn nation, to a near-empire that spanned the continent. It was a time in which the "dream of our founders" spread in ways that few men of that Revolutionary Generation could possibly...