The Journal of the Debates in the Convention Which Framed the Constitution of the United States, May-September 1787. Volume 1

This is not a history book about the Constitutional Convention. It is the Convention itself, captured in James Madison's meticulous hand. Here, the Founding Fathers shed their marble-statue aura and become something far more compelling: desperate, arguing, compromising politicians trying to forge a government from the wreckage of the Articles of Confederation. You'll hear the Virginia Plan clash with the New Jersey Plan. You'll listen to Hamilton advocate (almost alone) for a lifetime executive with king-like powers. You'll witness the Great Compromise being hammered out in real time, see the ugly negotiations over representation and slavery, feel the summer heat through Madison's prose. This is primary source material at its most vital. The prose is dense and the context required is substantial, but for readers willing to meet it on its own terms, there is nothing else quite like it: the actual moment where America invented itself, messy and human and extraordinary.