Then, The Federalist Papers, of course.

Followed up by an ancient book, Herbert J. Storing’s What the Anti-Federalists Were For. Notwithstanding ratification of the Constitution, strains of anti-Federalist concerns and principles not only permeated the full pre-Jackson era, they are detectable even today in both major parties’ platforms.

Storing believed the Federalists prevailed because they had better thoughts and arguments. For example, Storing argues that anti-Federalist urgings for a small republic were inconsistent with American expectations that the republic would someday stretch from sea to bright sea.

Another ancient book, The Federalist Era: 1780-1801, by John C. Miller is an outstanding account of the actual creation of the Union as a working organization and the inevitable clashes among the men that surrounded Washington and Adams.

Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006) is an simple to read account of the founders and their doings.

Henry Brooks Adams’s two-volume History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891) is a excellent choice for coverage 1800 through 1817. Despite Adams’s family relations with then-active politicians, his work is considered scrupulously honest.

Biographies of Adams (Joseph J. Ellis’s Passionate Sage: The Reputation and Legacy of John Adams (1993), or the recent John Adams (2002) by David McCullough), Jefferson (Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (1948–82) is a comprehensive, though maybe a small too sympathetic, treatment), and Andrew Jackson (Robert V. Remini’s The Life of Andrew Jackson (1988) or his Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977) are excellent choices).

If you want to take this on on the light, try Storings’s Anti-Federalists and Wood’s Revolutionary Charactors, both of which are small and Wood’s book, especially, is simple to read.

LaFeber, Walter. The American Age: US Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad 1750 to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.
ISBN: 0393964744

and

Merrill, Dennis, ed., and Thomas G. Paterson, ed. Major Problems in American Foreign Relations: Concise Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
ISBN: 0618376399

This last book is more of a collection of primary documents, but each chapter concludes with essays taking on different perspectives of the corresponding issues raised in that chapter. This might be helpful to you to see both the primary sources (a limited amount and frequently excerpts) as well as the opposing policy points of view found in both the documents and the analytical essays.

I hope this helps in some way.

My son, who’s a history buff, says Bennett spends a lot of time on the Presidents and found this book an simple read.

You might like this as well
http://www.amazon.com/New-Party-Politics-Jefferson-Information/dp/0534560237/ref=sr_1_1/002-5194276-5249667?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187098123&sr=1-1

New Party Politics: From Jefferson and Hamilton to the Information Age (Paperback)
by John Kenneth White
$51.21

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