Henry Laurens – President of the Continental Congress (1777–1778)
In the hard winter of 1777, when the wind off the Susquehanna cut through wool and warmed breath froze to mustaches, a cluster of men in borrowed rooms tried to keep a country alive…
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American Presidents
Verified podcast archive on the lives and administrations of American presidents.
Thomas McKean – President of Congress (1781)
This project traces the American presidency back before there was a President in the modern sense, following the thread from the presiding officers of the Continental and Confederation Congresses through the constitutional office that…
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson arrives in the American story as the author of a sentence so large that it keeps upstaging the life that wrote it. A young lawyer with a delicate voice and a ferocious…
George Washington
Under the weight of later monuments it is easy to forget that George Washington began as a boy who learned to read the land before he learned to read the law. In the tidewater…
Henry Middleton – Second President of the First Continental Congress (1774)
On a humid afternoon in the fall of 1774, when the air in Philadelphia still held a faint memory of summer, the delegates to the First Continental Congress returned from dinner to find that…
Peyton Randolph – First President of the First Continental Congress (1774)
In the autumn of 1774, long before anyone could imagine a “President of the United States,” a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and improvised a government. They did not call it that, not…