Power couples aren’t a modern phenomenon. The greatest American couple ever to have served America in a public capacity was the country’s fourth president, James Madison, and his wife, who is considered to be our first, First Lady, Dolley Madison.

In his heartwarming, lively, and accessible book Dolley and James Madison: An Unlikely Love Story that Saved America, Rodney K. Smith, who directs the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University, chronicles two remarkable and inspiring lives of service, a story that remains as relevant today as it was two centuries ago. Of note is Smith’s emphasis on the significance of Dolley’s role in the founding of the United States. Without her efforts to build civility in a time more tumultuous than our own, it is unlikely that we would have survived our first generation as a nation conceived in liberty, secured by the constitutional rule of law and liberty.