Long before the American founders debated federalism, before the architects of the United Nations gathered in San Francisco, before the European Union was even imaginable, a man in a white canoe crossed a lake and changed the world. The Peacemaker and Hiawatha brought five warring nations together under the Great Law of Peace --- a living constitution built on a revolutionary idea: that sovereignty need not be absolute to be real. That nations could remain themselves and still choose something larger. Harmonia traces the thread from a forest in what is now upstate New York through six centuries of human political imagination, arriving at a world that is still --- imperfectly, noisily, unmistakably --- being built on the Peacemaker's vision.

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