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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 to the politics of slavery, and a target of unbridled land speculation-our nation's capital?

Washington, award-winning author Fergus M. Bordewich turns his eye to the backroom deal making and shifting alliances among our Founding Fathers and in so doing pulls back the curtain on the lives of the slaves who actually built the city. The answers revealed in this eye-opening and well-researched book are not only surprising and exciting but also illuminate a story of unexpected triumph over a multitude of political and financial obstacles, including fraudulent real estate speculation, overextended financiers, and management more apt for a "banana republic" than an emerging world power.

In an engrossing work that reveals the hidden and unsavery side of the nation's beginnings, Bordewich once again brings his novelist's sensibility to a little-known chapter in American history.