Fergus M. Bordewich

The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function....

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil—when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the...

The story of how Congress helped win the Civil War--a new perspective that puts the House and Senate, rather than Lincoln, at the center of the conflict. This brilliantly argued new perspective on the Civil War overturns the popular conception that Abraham Lincoln single-handedly led the Union...

Washington, D.C., is home to the most influential power brokers in the world. But how did we come to call D.C. - a place one contemporary observer called a mere swamp "producing nothing except myriads of toads and frogs (of enormous size)", a district that was strategically indefensible, captive...

An important book of epic scope on America's first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for change. The true story of the Underground Railroad is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's westward expansion...

The Mexican War introduced vast new territories into the United States, among them California and the present-day Southwest. When gold was discovered in California in the great Gold Rush of 1849, the population swelled, and settlers petitioned for admission to the Union. But the U.S. Senate was...

An important book of epic scope on America’s first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for change The civil war brought to a climax the country’s bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery’s denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and...

The grand spectacle that marked America’s first century—and a moment of reckoning for a nation in flux “Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before their eyes.” Held at Fairmount Park, in Philadelphia, the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 attracted 10...