Washington

Today the District of Columbia is home to many of the most powerful decision makers in the world. Yet the site was once a marshy tract that seemed to produce little beyond frogs and toads, it was hard to defend, it was caught up in the politics of slavery, and it was ripe for speculative land grabs. Fergus M. Bordewich asks how such a place came to be the national capital.

He traces the answer to the private bargains and shifting partnerships among the men who founded the republic. Along the way, he brings into view the enslaved laborers whose work actually raised the city from the ground.

The story is one of improbable success despite a long run of setbacks, including crooked property deals, financiers who had overextended themselves, and an administration that looked more like one in an unstable developing nation than the government of a rising world power. Bordewich, a novelist by background, gives the account a narrative drive while exposing the less flattering side of the nation's beginnings and turning his attention to an overlooked chapter of American history.