In Charles River Editors' History for Kids series, your children can learn about history's most important people and events in an easy, entertaining and educational way.

The Founding Fathers have been revered by Americans for over 200 years, celebrated for creating a new nation founded upon the loftiest ideals of democracy and meritocracy. But if the American Dream has come to represent the ability to climb the social ladder with skill and hard work, no Founding Father represented the new America more than Alexander Hamilton.

Unfortunately, one of the best known aspects of Hamilton's (1755-1804) life is the manner in which he died: shot and killed in a famous duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. But Hamilton started as an orphaned child in the West Indies before becoming one of the most instrumental Founding Fathers of the United States in that time - not only in helping draft and gain support for the U.S. Constitution, but in also leading the Federalist party and building the institutions of the young federal government as Washington's Secretary of Treasury.

Hamilton is also well remembered for his authorship, along with John Jay and James Madison, of the Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers sought to rally support for the Constitution's approval when those three anonymously wrote them, but they demonstrate how men of vastly different political ideologies came to accept the same Constitution.