The Shortest History of the United States of America

When Britain’s thirteen American colonies declared their independence on 4 July 1776, the United States of America was born. But it was hardly united.

In this superbly written book, Don Watson traces how the central conflicts of the United States - those over freedom, race, frontiers, enterprise, religion and violence - play out through its history: a country at war with itself in the 1860s, the leader of the free world less than a hundred years later, and a nation beset by wild divis…