It's a structural symmetry, this building of elegant Georgian design, a neo-classical order made

of humble red brick and off white woodwork.

A clock tower rises overhead and a bell-free where the Liberty

bell, as it will one day be known, hangs suspended between pillars that narrow to aspire.

In the torturously hot and humid summer of 1787, the windows of this now famous building,

the old Pennsylvania Statehouse, have been nailed shut for secrecy as delegates from 12 of the 13 states, Rhode Island being conspicuously

absent, are gathered.

Many of these same men convened 11 years earlier to sign the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming their new nation free from

British monarchy.

Now they have undertaken another bold challenge, deciding in a short matter of months, how the separate states of America can somehow be more effectively

united. Hello again. Welcome back to American History Hit. I'm Don Wilden glad you could join us.

The year 2037 looms large in our future but I'm betting not enough Americans could

tell you why we hope to change that in the next half hour. In that year,

still 14 years off as I speak into this microphone, we will celebrate the

250th anniversary of the founding of this nation, More specifically, the gathering of 55 framers,

who in the Philadelphia Summer of 1787

hotly debated the various ideas of how to govern the country

and then drafted the original words of the Constitution of the United States,

that document which finally laid out the basic foundational structure of federal governance of our nation,

and which today, remarkably, we still abide by.

For me, it's helpful to think of that year, 1787, as an end date, a bookend at the far end of the founding

period, which begins in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence.

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