The years 1783 to 1830 were perhaps the most exciting, most innovative in American history. The Revolution had ended and the colonials-turned-citizens were running their new country—within which another kind of revolution had begun. For the Declaration of Independence declared that "all men are created equal," and as Edwin Tunis explains in this superb book, "to most of the brave signers the phrase was mere oratory... but to the lowly artisans in the towns, to the taciturn frontiersmen in the western woods, it meant just what it said."

Mr. Tunis writes about the special quality of personal and family life as well as about historical events in the ebullient young United States. His brilliant text is enlivened with over 165 detailed and accurate as well as handsome pencil drawings. The building and furnishing of log houses on the farms, brick and stone dwellings in the towns and cities; the fashion in clothes—the poke bonnet and "Kate Greenaway dress" linsey-woolsey and calico, wigs and neckerchiefs—are pictured and described. Here too are vivid scenes of peddlers and merchants on the streets and in the coffee houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the city Thomas Jefferson thought finer than London or Paris. The author takes the reader inside the theaters, homes, factories, and shipyards of the nation, and behind the scenes of the government. All the history-making events of these years are included—the War of 1812, the blockade and burning of Washington, the debates of Henry Clay, the attempt by Congress to suppress the slave trade, the continuing fight for religious freedom, the growth of schools and colleges. The reader is given a rich portrait of the first fifty years in the life of the American republic.

From the dust jacket