The latest in Don Watson’s intermittent series of books and essays about the United States – which now spans twenty-five years – finds him in a melancholy mood, though not quite ready to write off America.

This might be a ‘shortest history’, but Watson rightly takes the time to begin his account long before 1776, when thirteen of Britain’s Atlantic Ocean colonies declared themselves independent, forming a new nation. In paying heed to key Indigenous groups and to various European efforts at settling the continent, he avoids the north-eastern parochialism that dominated historical surveys of the United States until as late as World War II. He also sets up the possibility of multiple approaches to telling the tale.