What kind of government did the founding fathers envision? Peter Kastor, a professor of history at Washington University, has spent years trying to address that question. He and his colleagues collected records of more than 37,000 people who worked for the federal government between 1789 and 1829. The results are now publicly viewable via the “Creating a Federal Government” digital archive. Kastor shares what he found in those records, the individual histories they contain, and what they say about the founders’ ideas about the federal government.