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 division and turmoil in the twenty-first century.

This is a story full of character and humour, told with great learning and insight – a perfect introduction to America, past and present.

'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.—Don Watson, The Shortest History of the United States of America

'Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States is a masterpiece of concision and analysis that extracts the DNA from the body politic and locates both the resilience and the pathologies in its genes. Nothing else I have read explains the sources of our current dilemmas as a nation more astutely. Every American should read it; it should be on the curriculum of every high school.' —Judith Thurman

'Don Watson, who has written extensively on the US, provides an insightful and clear account of the country, its founding ideas and the people who have tested ''the truth of those ideas".' —The Age