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 latest book, Don Watson traces how the central conflicts of the United States – those over freedom, race, frontiers, enterprise, religion and violence – play out throughi ts 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 division and turmoil in the twenty-first century.

As he notes: ‘These were indeed strange times. Yet the forces at work in them were not new. Men like Donald Trump are embedded in US history, mythology and popular culture. Rank populists, hucksters, fakers, grifters, rent-seekers, blowhards, tycoons, kleptocrats, narcissists, psychopaths and delinquents – or, from the other point of view, rugged individualists, entrepreneurs, men of vision, men of destiny, instruments of God. No diorama of mainstream American life in any era could be without them.’