The nomination – and subsequent election – of Barack Obama undoubtedly initiated a new phase in American politics. The impact was also felt more broadly, though, with the emergence of such a rarified type of American politician – one who transcended previous racial and cultural boundaries – posing questions about the meaning of American identity and, more broadly, the narrative of American history. The imagery of the Obama campaign and its impact on the world motivated the British historian Simon Schama – himself an expatriate living and working in the US – to develop a new television series and accompanying book to seek to understand these new developments and to draw out the way that this “new” American history has developed. Early on in the book, for instance, he writes, “Waiting out there to be recounted are competing histories of the United States. My hunch is that it's the most compelling storyteller, the best historian, who will be raising her or his hand beside the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, come January 2009” (8). He expands upon this further at the end of the book, detailing the national self-appraisal that the 2008 election engendered in the US:

Since January 2009, of course, the reality has been less spectacular than many people – including Schama – had hoped or imagined. The Obama administration has begun to make changes to US policy – some, in the areas of healthcare and foreign policy, pointing in substantive new directions – but the symbolism and imagery of the president has, so far, proven to be more galvanizing than his administration. Obama's emergence has had a major impact on the way that people perceive America and how they understand the nation's development and its characteristics. The historical tale has not been rewritten, but it does now suggest a set of new lessons to be drawn from the American past. “How surprising is it that the nation that began by wanting everything, including politics and nationhood, to be minted afresh,” Schama asks, “should nonetheless need the mirror of time in which to see itself; to reach out and back to history for a sense of its own future purpose” (21–2)?

In the television series and book, then, Schama investigates the (hypothesized) American future by exploring snapshots of American history loosely based around four themes: American fervour, American plenty, American war, and what an American is. From these broad themes, he suggests, we can draw key lessons about what the American national psyche is and how it might regenerate following the 2008 election. Schama's political sympathies are clearly evident throughout, but he manages to avoid writing a paean to Obama – instead crafting a thought-provoking and original take on the notion of Americana.

We are therefore delighted to be able to feature a round table of the project in the Journal of American Studies as Schama's approach operates on a series of levels of particular relevance to the field of American studies. Moreover, this has been reflected in the nature of the commentaries from our reviewers, Dave Murray, Will Kaufman, and Clive Webb. Like The American Future itself, the reviewers have been able to draw on particular parts of the series and examine particular aspects of it which speak to differing areas of American studies. Thus meditations on the music used, the historical examples cited, or the visual images that were constructed have, in themselves, created a fluid discussion not just about Schama's analysis of contemporary America and its past, but also about what the images and stories used tell us – as scholars of American studies – about the United States and its ongoing development. By taking the direction of an evolving conversation, the round table has taken a shape that was probably the author's intention all along.

Simon Schama's series was broadcast during the presidential race, at a time of great British interest in America but also lingering and widespread scorn for recent American actions and attitudes. What better time, then, to challenge British prejudices and cynicism about America, than when it was poised on the brink of real change, with the prospect of a black President?

Schama rises to the challenge with a suitably powerful and generous vision of America. Rather than a conventional narrative, each episode is organized around a theme, illustrated by cleverly chosen stories of groups or individuals. Though this is a history, Schama's point is that to understand America we need to understand not only its past, but also its distinctive sense of its future, as his paradoxical title suggests; in each episode we continually return to the present electoral moment when Americans are actually making a crucial choice of their future.

Visually the programmes are often compelling, with arresting archive material blended with contemporary footage, though sometimes there is just too much anxiety to provide a visual image at all costs. At the word “water,” for instance, we must see water, rather than a talking head. There are also the inevitable shots of Schama looking thoughtful in varying landscapes, but one stylistic trait – that almost becomes a tic, particularly in the first two episodes – is the insistent conjunction of old and new. So an archive film of a steam train will almost inevitably be quickly crosscut with images of a new highway. Juxtaposition of this sort can be used to bring out either contrast or similarity, but sometimes it seems to have no clear intention, and runs the risk of distracting the viewer from the narrative sequence of the commentary. Clearly the whole programme is set up with these conjunctions and continuities of past and present in mind, but its title points to something more. On the one hand, American history is like others, and happens in a sequence, within which we can try to trace causes and effects and make judgements. On the other hand, we can only make sense of America as an idea, a promise of a future, and judge it not just by its actions but also by its goals and its larger underlying direction and promise.

At the heart of this is the well-worn idea of American exceptionalism: the idea of America as a project, the unfolding of an idea that is already present in potentia from the beginning, so that the real and full America – its destiny – is in the future. This teleological model need not be celebratory, and America's various Jeremiahs have claimed the right to hold it to higher standards than other countries, precisely because of its special place as the last best hope, but it does mean that America is always the answer as well as the problem. So Schama's characteristic stance throughout is not to flinch from showing the ways in which America has fallen short of its ideals, but always to return to the idea that America is more than, and indeed other than, its failures.

The first episode, “American Plenty,” is a good example of this. The old idea of an unbounded land with limitless resources is quickly sketched and shown to be in crisis, with shots of parched land and queues at filling stations. “This is the tale of Paradise Lost,” we are told, and “the American Garden is drying out.” Rather than settling into an account of American profligacy, though, Schama traces a thread (he calls it a tradition) of warnings about the need to recognize limits, through John Wesley Powell's pessimism about water supplies for the West, Hugh Bennett's warnings about soil management, and Jimmy Carter's warnings about energy. Finally, he even makes a case for learning from Las Vegas in the ways it is tackling its water shortage. In this way he is able, even on this unpromising topic, to focus on the positive, ending with a rhetorical flourish. Even when America's resources are in short supply, he insists, its resourcefulness is not. So he is able to end with a sense of plenty and promise that resides in the idea of America and its people even if no longer in the land itself.

The same tactic is adopted in the episode on American war, in which every negative event is balanced, and ultimately outweighed, by a positive aspect which is then presented as the quintessentially American one. Here that positive aspect is the tradition of moral scrutiny which demands that a war needs to be justified by more than just power or greed. The noise of the gun, we are told, is always answered by the irrepressible sound of free debate, and the programme opens with ‘the unruly animal American democracy’ stirring in Iowa, where the presidential primaries are fuelled by debates over the Iraq war. Schama traces this “tradition” of questioning the purposes for which America goes to war back at least to the opposing views of Jefferson and Hamilton, an opposition he effectively shows to be present even in the founding principles of West Point itself. He brilliantly uses the fortunes of the Meigs family to show not only the widespread and interlocked tragedies of the Civil War, but also the continuing engagement with the meaning and purpose of war which he argues is at the heart of America.

Stressing these debates and dissenters is an effective way of rebutting easy generalizations about American misuse of power based on recent history. Thus Theodore Roosevelt's imperialism is countered in Schama's account by Mark Twain's powerful denunciations, not because these actually stopped the killing but because they represent an irrepressible American spirit. Only a war fought for the highest principles can be justified and owned as worthy of America. If it is to be an “American war,” he tells us, then America needs to be sure it is being fought for the right moral purpose … and if most of the wars were in fact not, then Schama can at least point to the powerful critique which opposed them and identify this as the real American impulse. I am not sure how many wars other than World War II would qualify under Schama's criteria, and it is surely a very particular sort of special pleading to define as “American” only a part of its activity, but this is the perennial danger of this sort of exceptionalist thinking.

Schama describes his aim in this episode as exploring “the haunting of the present by the past,” and his overall narrative twists and turns do this beautifully and often with a real and appropriate gravity, given his topic of war. The story of the Meigs family, for instance, makes for fascinating television, because of the compelling nature of the narrative. As in a Dickens novel, we see things being resolved and continuing in surprising ways across the generations. Unfortunately this interweaving of past and present also provokes the film editor into some obsessive and distracting crosscutting of present and past, as with the scene of an elderly veteran preparing for a ceremonial dinner, crosscut every other second with a World War II image. In contrast, some of the most powerful sequences are those filmed at the battleground at Gettysburg, where the present sombre setting, cut with older images, works beautifully to complement Schama's powerful meditations.

“American Fervour” acts as a useful corrective to the idea that American religion is mostly fundamentalist and right-wing, and Schama's aim is to show how America in fact is able to bring together his two great themes of passionate belief (illustrated with some fascinating footage of diverse forms of worship and preaching) and zeal for freedom. His key figure here is Thomas Jefferson, as champion of both freedom of religion and freedom from religion, and he uses the experience of Jews in America as a telling example of the revolutionary nature of these freedoms. Using Barack Obama's own religious roots, he notes the importance in this election of a different sort of Christianity, represented by the black churches, who have historically used their religion as a space of freedom and communal self-definition, exemplified in the civil rights movement and here, in one of his own heroes, Fannie Lou Hamer.

The final episode, “What Is an American?”, is an account of some of the policies of racial inclusion and exclusion which have shaped America's answer to Crèvecoeur's question. Certainly there is no glossing over here of the history of racial and ethnic discrimination, and Schama foregrounds the case of the Mexicans and the Chinese to point to a strand of hatred that is less familiar, but may be just as shocking, to British audiences, as that of southern slavery and its legacies. As he points out, the Statue of Liberty was being erected in the same year that Chinese workers were being viciously hounded out of parts of California, but it is characteristic of his approach that this juxtaposition is used to illustrate not American hypocrisy, but its genuine and continuing promise, as worked out over the years. He does this through an effective technique, deployed throughout the series, of using an individual to represent the positive thread running through even the most negative stories. Here he focusses on the reformer Grace Abbott's vision of an America enriched, rather than threatened, by its diversity. In celebrating America as “many nationalities scattered across a continent,” Abbott is shown to reach beyond ideas of prescriptive assimilation, and Schama is of course able to present the success of Obama, with his mixed heritage, as America's future actualized in the present.

In the conclusion to this episode and to the whole series, Simon Schama identifies himself as just one more American immigrant, happy to assert that “without starry eyes I do believe in the American future.” The series was clearly built on the hope that an Obama victory would exemplify and actualize that future, in spite of some hedging of bets. Ronald Reagan was reportedly so impressed by Alistair Cooke's TV series on America in the 1970s that he ordered that a copy of the book be placed in every school library. Schama's optimistic series has a less grand purpose than Cooke's chronicle, but in its eloquence and vision it is a British tribute that the new President would surely appreciate as much as his predecessor did. As for the British audience, at which this is aimed, even while accepting this as a timely antidote to the lazy cynicism about America that the Bush era has encouraged, many might still have to swallow hard to go along just yet with Schama's celebratory optimism. Even accepting his exceptionalist vision, the sort of American future he has in mind might turn out still to be waiting in the past.

I must confess that I approached the initial broadcast of Simon Schama's The American Future in a state of media fatigue, given that the period seemed to be overrun with televised American road trips by the likes of Stephen Fry, Jon Snow and others. This was inevitable in the run-up to the Obama–McCain presidential face-off, which influenced so much of US-related television programming in the UK.

Schama's series proved no exception to this. It was clear that his strategy, in the unenviable task of linking together the entire American past and future in four episodes, was to filter historical complexities through contests between two individuals over a given topic, in much the same manner as the current political and cultural complexities were being filtered through the gladiatorial personae of Obama and McCain. One also sensed here the influence of Ken Burns, whose documentaries on the Civil War, jazz, baseball and the Second World War tend to explore the subjects through the stories of its significant dramatic figures, both celebrated and obscure.

The Schama series was punctuated by clips of Obama and McCain and the references were clear: this was “the ‘moment of truth’ election,” not just about race but about the environment. The 2008 election was akin to the “great war elections of the past.” So I did not question the presence of the two presidential candidates. However, I was sometimes intrigued – not unpleasantly – by the choice of individual filters. In a discussion of the land and the environment, for instance, why start with Andrew Jackson rather than the architect of the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson? But the pairings were, in the end, well chosen and illuminating, as in the juxtaposition of John Wesley Powell, the nineteenth-century Cassandra warning about oversettlement, and a contemporary “ditch rider” in Powell, Wyoming, metering out water for farmers amidst the staggering depletion of the water table.

Some of the antagonistic pairings seemed obvious, such as Hamilton versus Jefferson over the creation of a standing army or Mark Twain versus Theodore Roosevelt over US expansion and imperialism. But again, some of the individual filters chosen by Schama were highly effective because they were unexpected, the most notable being the choice of one Kyu H. Chat, the son of Schama's neighbour in New York State, killed in the Afghanistan war. As Schama stood at this young man's – or boy's – grave at Arlington Cemetery, I had to ask myself whether this was honourable critique or exploitative, sentimental television. I came down on the side of honourable critique, because it showed Schama's genius in admitting the proper place of emotion in our judgements. Hence Schama's own confession when reading the grotesque Chinese-baiting of the California nativist, Charles MacLachan (“It turns my stomach to read this kind of thing”) or his response to Dick Cheney's description of the US as “a peaceful nation” during a Veterans' Day speech (“That's rich, coming from him”).

Having said this, some of Schama's verbal punctuations made me wince, especially when he appeared too desperate for the soundbite. Thus, against a newsreel image of the Dust Bowl, he intoned, “This is what happened to the Little House on the Prairie.” One could almost picture him practising that line in front of the mirror. I was much more impressed by his extemporaneous interjections, which managed to convey so much in spite of their clumsiness – as at the Gettysburg battlefield, when Schama's awe seemed almost inexpressible: “It's farmland. It's farmland – but you walk along here and squish the mud, and you feel that bones are going to pop up.”

Schama has obviously taken many cues from Ken Burns. Indeed, in reviewing Burns's The Civil War nearly two decades ago, he wrote that the historian's “pressing task” is to recast history in “the forms by which it can catch the public imagination. That form … ought to be narrative; not to discard argument and analysis, but to lend it proper dramatic and poetic power.” In taking on this challenge, he inevitably encountered some of its pitfalls, inviting a concern similar to that expressed by the Civil War historian Gabor Boritt over Burns's series: “I am disgruntled as a scholar but wonder about the possible artistic rationale that I may not understand. How to balance the historical loss against an artistic gain?” (Boritt's final judgement should perhaps give us pause: “It contains errors of fact, perhaps errors of interpretation. But the beauty of the film silences the critical voice.”)

For “proper drama and poetic power,” Burns not only focussed on individuals but placed equal importance on his visuals – so much so that his signal technique of slow panning across still images, zooming in on them and blending their transitions, has been dubbed “the Ken Burns effect” in Apple computer, iPhoto, iMovie, and iPod software. Schama did not face Burns's limitations of relying (in The Civil War, at least) on the dramatic use of antique still images, but his documentary employed near-still images – particularly landscape – to stunning effect (for instance, the breathtaking shots of Lake Meade at less than half capacity). There were perhaps too many shots of Schama himself staring pensively into the far distance – and I was suspicious of what appeared to be a computer-generated image of Dust Bowl desertification. Overall, however, the cinematography of Neil Harvey and Dirk Nel was suitably dramatic.

The juxtaposition of images, either among themselves or against the narration, sometimes caused concern – again, similar to that felt by Boritt during The Civil War: “Voice: Chancellorsville; photo: Wilderness. Voice: Mrs. Chesnut; photo: unknown person … How much mismatching is demanded or justified by art?” In Schama's case, there were some heavy-handed juxtapositions of imagery and narration. For instance, discussion of the Philippines in 1898–1901 was predictably illustrated with Vietnam War footage, complete with helicopters. Then again, one could appreciate the intended disjuncture between the shabby and desolate trailer park of today and the majestic launching point for Powell's momentous exploration of the Colorado river: the same place over a century apart. Sometimes, the images needed no explanation; a fly-on-the-wall camera was enough, as during a very ugly street-corner confrontation between Mexican workers and US nativists sporting the American and Texan flags, along with placards reading “Nail them and jail them.” As the camera cut to some members of the nativist crowd mimicking lynching in the faces of these Mexicans, one could immediately see that Schama was inviting a similar response to his own when he was reading “the evil dripping from the pages” of Charles MacLachan's anti-Chinese editorials.

It is true to say that a documentary runs on its music, and this was the case with Schama, as with Burns before him. Here again, the echo with Burns at times appeared deliberate to the point of being derivative. Nearly all of us can recall the tones of Jacqueline Schwab's melancholy piano over Burns's Civil War images; Schama's own Civil War visuals were accompanied by similar piano music. And if Ry Cooder's slide guitar in Paris, Texas and Southern Comfort set the template for every image of an American desert or swamp – whether in documentaries or TV advertisements – Schama's work was not wholly immune to this musical cliché. High-speed nickelodeon footage was inevitably matched with comical ragtime music, as expected. These exceptions aside, however, the music did its job, not only in terms of the atmospheric score by Andy Cowton. The choice of Woody Guthrie's “I Ain't Got No Home” to underscore the Dust Bowl migration did not appear to be a cliché – on the contrary, one would miss it if it were not there.

Music was often used as an ironic reference. Episode 1, on America's fast-depleting natural resources, concluded with the mocking blast of Credence Clearwater Revival's “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” while the indignities of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist currents were illustrated by the grotesque footage of white cabaret performers in oriental blackface singing “Chinatown, My Chinatown” to Schama's outraged voice-over: “Clownish, inhuman, Ching Chong Chinamen.” Pointedly, we were then treated to the beautiful violin music of a contemporary Chinese resident of Truckee, California, the epicentre of MacLachan's campaign of nativist hatred.

Significantly, Schama used the opportunity to take the music beyond its customary function of atmospheric or implicit commentary, incorporating the music (and the musicians) as documentary subjects in themselves. Thus, while we heard a verse of the Dillards' song “The Old Home Place,” Schama described the ways in which bluegrass music has helped poor white Americans both to escape and to express the toughness of their lives, not least through its strong Protestant undercurrents. When we heard some Tex-Mex border music overlain on a discussion of the Mexican–American War and its legacy, we were then invited to listen to the musicians, Mexicans in Stetsons, setting aside their guitars and accordions to discuss what American freedom means to them. Finally, when Schama revealed his hero-worshipping of Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, he did so by focussing on Hamer's own linkage between gospel music and social freedom and between church songs and voter registration, inviting Hamer's daughter, Vergie, to sing some of her mother's inspiring songs at her graveside. It is particularly gratifying to see music used to such integral effect in a documentary.

Like any performer, Schama was aware that he needed to save the best material for the last quarter of his gig – and so he did this with the fourth and, to my mind, the best episode, “What Is an American?”. The last nine minutes of the episode (and thus the entire series) offered upbeat attention to the Nebraska social worker and advocate Grace Abbott, who in The Immigrant and the Community (1917) had answered Crèvecoeur's famous question thus: “We are many nationalities scattered over a continent. We should not be ashamed of this, but recognize the opportunity this brings. If all the races on Earth can live together in America, and if we can respect their differences, then we shall meet the American opportunity.” Throughout the voice-over reading this passage, we saw images of American Muslims at prayer and minarets in the heartland. Chuck Alawan, a beefy Detroit Muslim who would look at home at any rodeo or Fourth of July parade, confessed to have prayed on 11 September 2001, “Please God, let it not be Muslims.” Schama's documentary fittingly gave Alawan very nearly the last word, as a signal that the “American opportunity” belongs as much to him as to anybody.

The American Future preceded the election of Barack Obama. It was clear whose side Schama was on. If one were looking for neutrality, one would not look to Schama. But given the history that his series covered, as well as the future at stake in the 2008 election, the pretence of neutrality would have been an insult in itself.

Fascinating, frustrating, insightful, incoherent: all of these reactions occurred as I watched Simon Schama's The American Future: A History. And that was less than halfway through the initial episode.

The setting for the series is the presidential election of 2008. At the time it was produced, the outcome of that contest was still uncertain. The prospect that American voters would elect the first black President in their history nonetheless induced Schama to evaluate how the country reached this watershed moment and what direction it would take thereafter. This is a series that therefore emphasizes the fundamental relevance of history to our understanding of the world in which we now live.

The four episodes respectively examine the issues of natural resources, war, religion and immigration. Episode 1 assesses the importance of the American West and its rich natural resources, not only as a source of prosperity but also as a symbol of freedom. Schama addresses the well-worn notion that an apparently limitless western frontier fuelled the optimism of the American character. Today, however, the drought-ridden lands of the West starkly demonstrate that “America has run out of infinity.” Schama stresses that Americans will have to face up to the fact that natural resources are not limitless. Drawing parallels between the present day and the Great Depression of the 1930s, he nonetheless concludes that it is precisely in such times of need that the American people demonstrate an ingenuity that is never in short supply. Such conclusions are typical of the hopeful tone of the series.

Schama argues in the second episode that although many people see the United States as a belligerent nation infatuated with military power, Americans perceive themselves as a peaceful democracy only reluctantly drawn into war. Modern-day anti-war activists are the inheritors of a dissenting tradition that Schama traces back to such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, who opposed the United States having a standing army, and Mark Twain, a passionate critic of American imperialism. Twain, however, endured censorship and accusations of treachery, experiences that compare with public criticism of opponents of the Iraq war. Hawkish press support of American military intervention and a desire to silence criticism is as much a tradition as doveish opposition. The isolationist attitude of the American people during the inter-war era also suggests that there is a negative aspect to the political mindset celebrated by Schama.

In the third episode, Schama observes that the influence of religion on the recent presidential race was at once contrary to, and consistent with, the past. The political mobilization of millions of predominantly white evangelical voters helped provide the Republican Party with control of the executive office for much of the last three decades. George W. Bush in particular evoked the power of the divine as the guiding force of his presidency. Yet in 2008, it was Democrat Barack Obama who claimed the mantle of man of faith from his Republican rival John McCain. While McCain struggled unsuccessfully to overcome the scepticism of many within the Christian right, Obama enlisted the support of black evangelicals to rally voters, many of whom were previously unregistered. Although the tables have turned in terms of political partisanship, the election all the same demonstrates the enduring role of religion in shaping American politics.

The political labouring of black evangelicals is, as Schama argues, also a contemporary manifestation of the religiously motivated activism that fuelled the civil rights revolution. Schama includes an interview with Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, who occupies the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta once held by Martin Luther King Jr. According to Warnock, the black church was “born fighting for freedom.” Schama traces the roots of African American Christianity back to pioneers like the relatively unknown black minister Andrew Bryan. He tells us little, however, about how African Americans constructed a liberation theology. The role of religion in fomenting slave rebellions is, for instance, absent from the narrative.

Instead, Schama focusses on the white evangelical and abolitionist Charles Finney. In contrasting the radicalism of Finney with the conservatism of contemporary evangelicals, Schama is able to make the shrewd observation that today's Christian right is a deviation from its historical roots. Schama relates how modern evangelism arose in reaction to an assertive secular culture, including wonderful footage of the charismatic preacher Billy Sunday, who was a forerunner of latter-day religious leaders like Jerry Falwell. The narrative nonetheless suffers from the omission of the most famous evangelist, Billy Graham.

While this sudden digression into the world of white evangelism is fascinating, the convoluted narrative weakens the impact of Schama's argument. This is unfortunate since his final point is well made, namely that the religiously inspired black activism that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually made it possible for an African American to be elected President.

The last episode in the series is also the most lucid. Schama narrates the historical experiences of two immigrant groups, Mexicans and Chinese, as a means to assess how the United States evolved into a multiethnic society. Although Schama does use some interesting case studies in the earlier episodes, he draws on such a miscellany of historical examples that his analysis of specific individuals or events is often superficial. Here, though, the simpler structure of the episode allows him to recount in more compelling detail how Mexicans and Chinese overcame displacement, discrimination and disfranchisement to claim the full rights of American citizenship.

The American Future is both a richly rewarding and unsatisfactory four hours of television. The most obvious criticism of the series is that, to adapt a phrase from the world of advertising, it does not do exactly what it says on the tin. Schama seldom attempts to predict how the same forces that have shaped the United States to the present day will also define the future of the country. He informs us, for instance, that by the middle of this century one-third of its population will be Hispanic. But what impact will this have on the cultural, political and economic dynamics of the United States? Schama interviews a California farmowner with an immigrant labour force who optimistically forecasts that the Hispanic population will become fully integrated into American society. The history of nativist intolerance towards immigrants that Schama relates in the same episode suggests that this process may be less than smooth, however, especially given the scale of demographic change anticipated by population experts. Will we also see the United States become an officially bilingual nation? And what effect will the influx of Hispanics have on African Americans who are no longer the largest racial or ethnic minority in the United States? Schama does not raise these questions, let alone answer them. Barack Obama, with his multinational and multiracial heritage, embodies a pluralist ethos that Schama believes will mould the future United States. But the debate about “What Is an American?”, to use the title of the episode, may become more rather than less intense.

This failure to forecast the future is particularly significant since the United States faces serious challenges in the twenty-first century. One of the reasons why a British audience is interested in the United States is that the country has such a profound impact on our lives. Culturally, Hollywood films monopolize our cinema screens while American retailers and fast-food outlets annex more and more of our high streets. Politically, the special relationship between the two countries has resulted in Britain committing its armed forces to support American military intervention in the Middle East. Economically, the current global financial crisis started in the United States. What Schama offers is nonetheless a very introspective analysis of the American past, present and future. We learn little about the United States' place in the world. What impact, for instance, will the War on Terror have on America's allies and enemies? Will the United States sustain its economic dominance or will it be surpassed by China and India? Whether or not the United States will retain its global hegemony is surely fundamental to Americans themselves and to the spirit of optimism Schama sees as defining their character.

A further shortcoming of the series is the absence of a clear chronological structure. This is a problem because the programme is presumably intended for a general audience that does not necessarily have a working knowledge of American history. The use of sources to construct an argument is necessarily an arbitrary process but Schama has a completely scattershot approach, lurching backwards and forwards in time in a manner that undermines his ability to demonstrate how the contemporary United States is the culmination of a set of forces that have shaped the country since its colonial origins. A better starting point for audiences unfamiliar with the basic chronology of American history is David Reynolds's BBC Radio 4 series America, Empire of Liberty. The two series nicely complement one another, Reynolds offering a more conventional narrative that contextualizes the more adventurous but occasionally byzantine analysis of Schama.

A final criticism should be made of the producers for their use of unidentified Hollywood film clips to illustrate the narrative. The series uses, for instance, cinematic re-creations of both the Spanish–American War of 1898 and acts of nativist violence against Chinese immigrants. The American Future is not unique among historical documentaries in using movie scenes where no documentary footage exists, but this sleight of hand should be acknowledged with an onscreen caption.

For all of its faults, the series offers rewarding insights into issues as diverse as the conflicting political visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the religious freedom offered to persecuted minorities by the United States, and the building of the Hoover Dam. The inclusion of the series in prime-time schedules should be welcomed for generating renewed interest in, and much argument about, the meaning of American history.