We know-and love-the story of the American Revolution, from the Declaration of Independence to Cornwallis’s defeat. But our first government was a disaster and the country was in a terrible crisis. So when a group of men traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to save a nation in danger of collapse, they had no great expectations for the meeting that would make history. But all the ideas, arguments, and compromises led to a great thing: a constitution and a government were born that have surpassed the founders’ greatest hopes.
Revisiting all the original documents and using her deep knowledge of eighteenth-century history and politics, Carol Berkin takes a fresh look at the men who framed the Constitution, the issues they faced, and the times they lived in. Berkin transports the listener into the hearts and minds of the founders, exposing their fears and their limited expectations of success.

The momentous story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams navigated the crises of the 1790s and in the process bound the states into a unified nation

Today the United States is the dominant power in world affairs, and that status seems assured. Yet in the decade following the ratification of the Constitution, the republic’s existence was contingent and fragile, challenged by domestic rebellions, foreign interference, and the always-present danger of collapse into mob rule.

Carol Berkin reveals that the nation survived almost entirely due to the actions of the Federalist leadership — George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. Reacting to successive crises, they extended the power of the federal government and fended off foreign attempts to subvert American sovereignty. As Berkin argues, the result was a spike in nationalism, as ordinary citizens began to identify with their nation first, their home states second.

While the Revolution freed the states and the Constitution linked them as never before, this landmark work shows that it was the Federalists who transformed the states into an enduring nation.

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld, Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women’s experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle.
Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle, and how they served as nurses and cooks in the army camps, risked their lives seeking personal freedom from slavery, and served as spies, saboteurs, and warriors.
She introduces us to sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who sped through the night to rouse the militiamen needed to defend Danbury, Connecticut; to Phillis Wheatley, literary prodigy and Boston slave, who voiced the hopes of African Americans in poems; to Margaret Corbin, crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth; to the women who gathered firewood, cooked, cleaned for the troops, nursed the wounded, and risked their lives carrying intelligence and participating in reconnaissance missions. Here, too, are Abigail Adams, Deborah Franklin, Lucy Knox, and Martha Washington, who lived with the daily knowledge that their husbands would be hanged as traitors if the revolution did not succeed.

Revered today for articulating America’s founding principles, the first ten amendments-the Bill of Rights-were in fact a political stratagem executed by James Madison to preserve the Constitution, the federal government, and the latter’s authority over the states.
In 1789, the young nation faced a great ideological divide around a question still unanswered today: Should broad power and authority reside in the federal government, or should it reside in state governments? The Bill of Rights was a political ploy first and matter of principle second. How and why Madison came to devise this plan, the divisive debates it fostered in the Congress, and its ultimate success in defeating antifederalist counterplans to severely restrict the powers of the federal government is more engrossing than any of the myths that shroud our national beginnings.
The debate over the founding fathers’ original intent continues to this day. By pulling back the curtain on the political, shortsighted, and self-interested intentions of the founding fathers in passing the Bill of Rights, Carol Berkin reveals the inherent weakness in these arguments and what it means for our country today.

One Day University presents a series of audio lectures recorded in real-time from some of the top minds in the United States. Given by award-winning professors and experts in their field, these recorded lectures dive deep into the worlds of religion, government, literature, and social justice. Most of us know that America’s Founding Fathers attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia and drafted the Constitution of the United States. The delegates decided to replace the Articles of Confederation with a document that strengthened the federal government, with the most contentious issue being legislative representation. Eventually, a compromise established the bicameral Congress to ensure both equal and proportional representation. But a lot more happened as well–much of it underreported or misunderstood. That’s the focus of this insider’s look at the birth of American government as we know it today. The fact is, the Founding Fathers were ambitious. Also grouchy, scared, and hopeful. They told jokes. They fought. They schemed. They gossiped. They improvised. Occasionally, they killed each other (sorry, Alexander Hamilton). Only by seeing the Founders as real people–not icons–can we appreciate the full story of the nation’s founding with all of its drama, humor, and significance intact. This audio lecture includes a supplemental PDF.

One Day University presents a series of audio lectures recorded in real-time from some of the top minds in the United States. Given by award-winning professors and experts in their field, these recorded lectures dive deep into the worlds of religion, government, literature, and social justice. This talk puts to rest another of the remarkable myths of the American Revolution: that it was an all-male affair. An 8 year home front war and American women didn’t notice it? In fact, the politicization of women in the 1760s and 1770s is one of the most striking consequences of the rebellion against British rule. Women made the boycotts of British imports work. They picketed merchants who dared to sell British cloth and tea. They produced homespun or “Liberty cloth” as they called it–willingly engaging in the single most boring task known to colonial America. Women wrote propaganda, from plays to poetry; they signed petitions–not as Mrs. so-and-so, but with their own names, a fact that horrified conservative colonists everywhere, and may have even laid the earliest foundation for the 19th Amendment over a century later. Valley Forge, Monmouth, etc. were not all male sites. Women and children flocked to the army each winter and transformed army camps into instant cities. Here they did the nursing, the cooking, and the washing. Women served as spies, as couriers, and as soldiers. And, thus for the first time schools were created for females. And, as we all know, education is a dangerous thing. It was the next generation who demanded equality. This audio lecture includes a supplemental PDF.

From the award-winning historian: the remarkable life of “the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore,” whose marriage in 1803 to JErome Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political nineteenth-century histories of the United States, France, and England. From the author of Revolutionary Mothers (“Incisive, thoughtful, spiced with vivid anecdotes. Don’t miss it.”-Thomas Fleming) and Civil War Wives (“Utterly freshSensitive, poignant, thoroughly fascinating.”-Jay Winik). In Wondrous Beauty, Carol Berkin tells the story of this audacious, outsize life: how her romantic, passionate marriage infuriated Napoleon and resulted in his banning the then-pregnant Betsy Bonaparte from disembarking in any European port, demanding that his brother either lose all power and remain married to that “American girl”-or renounce her, marry a woman of Napoleon’s choice, and reap the benefits. JErome ended the marriage and was made king of Westphalia; Betsy fled to England, and gave birth to her son and only child, JErome’s namesake. Berkin writes how this naIve, headstrong American girl returned to Baltimore a cynical, independent woman, refusing to seek social redemption and return to obscurity through a quiet marriage to a member of Baltimore’s merchant class; how she disdained America’s obsession with money-making, its growing ethos of democracy, and the rigid gender roles that confined women to the parlor and the nursery, and sought a European society where women created salons devoted to intellectual life and where traditions of aristocracy dominated society; and, we see how as a shrewd investor she transformed a modest pension from the French government into a fortune that rivaled many a (male) financier.