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When I first moved to America, I made a determined effort to read up on American history. The need to do this — for someone educated in Britain — cannot be over-stressed.

Most people outside of this country are entirely ignorant of American history. Even the War of Independence is a mystery to most people. Jessica Mitford once observed that British schoolchildren leave their education with the sense that America did something bad in the late 18th century and it isn’t polite to mention it.

But if you are going to live in a country you should make an effort to learn that country’s history. Or so I think. Though I have discovered how unpopular this view is.

One of the books I started before moving here was Paul Johnson’s book “A History of the American People.” It seized me from its opening lines: “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.”

Johnson’s book was published in 1997, before the latest round of historians got to work. Today most fashionable historians would dismiss Johnson’s opening lines as hopelessly gauche and unsophisticated.

That is because sometime from the 1990s onwards this country’s story started getting retold in another light. There was a greater emphasis on the way in which Native Americans were treated. A trend grew for pulling down all those American leaders who had literally been put on pedestals. And there was a concerted effort to center the trans-Atlantic slave-trade as being at the heart — if not the foundation — of the American story.

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