We describe the BOOMERANG North America instrument, a balloon-borne bolometric radiometer designed to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation with 0=3 resolution over a significant portion of the sky. This receiver employs new technologies in bolometers, readout electronics, millimeterwave optics and filters, cryogenics, scan, and attitude reconstruction. All these subsystems are described in detail in this paper. The system has been fully calibrated in flight using a variety of techniques, which are described and compared. Using this system, we have obtained a measurement of the first peak in the CMB angular power spectrum in a single, few hour long balloon flight. The instrument described here was a prototype of the BOOMERANG Long Duration Balloon experiment.