Contains stories from early American history, including the French Huguenots arrival in America, the story behind the pigs carried by Columbus that might have been responsible for the disease that spread throughout the Native American population, and the lesser known background of 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...