John and Abigail Adams, Washington, Hamilton, Burr, Franklin, Jefferson and Madison. Ellis takes moments from history — Hamilton and Burr's duel, Washington's farewell address, Adam's and Jefferson's letters to each other — and uses them as a platform to explain in very-easy-to-understand terms how our government was formed. He has a section at the beginning of the book that I thought was brilliant. He explains the two philosophies of government, limited government with a lot of individual liberty versus strong government with the concentration on the larger good. Then he says, "... both sides have legitimate claims on historical truth and both sides speak for the deepest impulses of the American Revolution. With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended. ... What distinguishes the American Revolution from most, if not all, subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that in the battle for supremacy, for the "true meaning" of the Revolution, neither side completely triumphed. Instead, the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. ... The debate was not resolved so much as it was built into the fabric of our national identity." If you are at all interested in the meaning of the American Revolution, the making of the Constitution or political theory, I recommend this book.