Destiny and doubt: Simon Schama's tour of America

In June this year, Simon Schama found himself sitting down to dinner with a Texas rancher who held liberal views on Hispanic immigration. The Texan, "lightly snorting like one of his own horses", rolled his eyes at the mention of a hard-line anti-migrant Republican Congressman and muttered: "He's an idiot." Nothing remarkable about this table-talk, perhaps, except that it took place over salmon, beef and berries in the drawing-room of 10 Downing Street, and that the pro-Hispanic rancher was named George W Bush. On immigration, Schama notes, the outgoing president is "more liberal than his party. He's more liberal than McCain's position now... I thought, you really are a lame-duck president. You don't care about offending people in your own party."

One of an "unlikely prattle of historians" summoned to dine with the president, Schama converted the episode into evidence with all his fluent mastery of the anecdote that spotlights a hidden truth. It's evidence of a particular kind: that America and Americans, even those most vilified abroad, harbour depths and divisions that their friends as well as enemies often ignore. As a Londoner who has spent almost half his life living in the US, Schama has taken his time before delivering a broad-brush panorama of its past. The American Future: a history (Bodley Head, £20), accompanied by a four-part BBC2 series which begins today, surveys his second home with all his trademark verve and virtuosity, on the eve of a genuinely decisive moment in its life.

In addition to its journeys deep into history to excavate the US experience of war, wealth, faith and migration, The American Future seizes its time to report on the heirs to these vast movements as they approach a fateful choice. From the snowy Iowa caucuses which first fuelled Obama's rise to the quarrelling congregation at a black church in Atlanta, Schama shows us voters with 300 years of history at their backs. He wanted, he says, to assemble "a portrait gallery of American responses to the moment, and to test the notion of whether they felt the election was more than just down-and-dirty mud wrestling as usual." The answer is affirmative. "What you haven't heard much of is, 'Oh, those politicians are all the same'."

This April, I heard Schama proclaim Barack Obama the next president of the US during a lecture just outside the walls of the Alhambra in Granada – the city whose seizure from the Moors in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella made them think again about funding a madcap adventurer called Christopher Columbus. Six months and a hundred swings and roundabouts later, we meet over breakfast just around the corner from his west London pied-à-terre.

He still has bags to pack for yet another transatlantic trip as he "bounces back and forth" between teaching at Columbia University and his never-ending media commitments. He will join the panel for Question Time from Washington DC next week, with election-night punditry duties also booked. Waiting for a flight at Heathrow last year, I heard: "Would Mr Schama, the last remaining passenger...". Perhaps they ought to pre-record that phrase.

So, I ask over the scrambled eggs, if you had to bet on the outcome in November, would it still be Obama? "Yes, but by a whisker." It will, Schama predicts, be "a very, very long night", with the result swayed not in the old rustbelt battlegrounds of Ohio or Pennsylvania but in the affluent Western "boomburbs" of Colorado. Hyper-active as ever, uncrushably affable, Schama the real professor worries that the Democratic candidate still looks too... well, academic. "Obama's not good at all on TV. His body language is all wrong... And he has this strange, literal, nose-in-the-air look ... like someone who's turned up for Plato's Symposium and finds himself in Big Brother. He does have a very friendly, easy manner in small gatherings. There's just something rigidly professorial about it." And so "The Republican bet is that, if they can get it back to small politics, the cult of affinity – 'Who would you rather have round to dinner?' – then they'll win."

A dialogue between large-hearted and small-minded America, between broad ideals and narrow fears, recurs right through the book. Schama reminds us, for example, that America's "serious second thoughts about the immigrant romance" began in the 1780s, part of a stubborn "nativist" current that still spatters Obama with the muddy taint of an alien background. The book recounts the "great American pogroms" of the 1870s that expelled Chinese workers from the Western towns their skills had helped to build.

Heart-breakingly, it revisits the Cherokee expulsions of the 1830s, when President Andrew Jackson – "the ethnic cleanser of the first democratic age" – punished with death-marches into the wilderness those Indians who had taken Jefferson's advice to settle down and cultivate the land. Schama tells this "repellent and awful and brutal" story with a special eloquence, even by his standards – but he may have a stake in it. His wife, a scientist, comes from a cattle-ranching family in Nevada and California. Her father, although it sounds like a Wild West fantasy, held the post of Nevada's official hunter of mountain lions. The clan's surnames include one with firm Native American connections; and so "I love to think that my kids are 1/32nd Cherokee."

The American Future, as with all of Schama's work, thrives on paradox. He loves to overturn the cliché and undermine the archetype. Citizens trampled all over the pieties of the French Revolution; Rembrandt's Eyes made mischief with conventional art history; in Dead Certainties, Schama – always a mesmerising storyteller – even rode roughshod over his trade's sacred separation of fact from fancy. His previous book – Rough Crossings – took delight in puncturing US patriotic myths as it followed the fate of the Loyalist ex-slaves who rallied to the British crown. In The American Future, our point of view never stays fixed for long. Cruelty and generosity, vision and violence, not merely alternate but co-exist in the same characters and concepts. As he shows how fundamentalist, Bible-bashing zealots in the early 19th century championed black emancipation, Schama points out that "History sets such snares to make us think harder."

Britons, in particular, have to think much harder about their fixed ideas. I wonder if the book aims above all to challenge glib European mockery of American religion. Schama agrees that here the Atlantic feels at its widest, "Partly because we've come such a long way from Victorian piety... The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church." His book reprints a long extract from the journal of Jarena Lee, one of a "black sisterhood of travelling preachers" who risked their lives to denounce the "national sin" of slavery.

"I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing – a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body," Schama says. Civil rights aside, he salutes the role of churches in compensating for that drifting solitude in US life that the sociologist Robert Putnam baptised Bowling Alone. "The antidote to 'bowling alone' is absolutely school and church": the twin pillars of a neighbourliness that flourishes in New England as it seldom still does in the old one. "I remember when we moved into Moon Hill [in Massachusetts], the mail box was not big enough to take the cakes and cookies which said, 'Hello!'. It wouldn't have happened in the Cowley Road."

With the strength of a neighbourhood comes the sense of its past. Everywhere he goes, Schama finds long and sharp memories. In Houston, Texas, he tours the barrios with Senate contender Rick Noriega, a fund of local lore that stretches to the Tejanos of the 1830s. "The extraordinary sense of the layering of immigrant experience was very striking, and quite fresh."

When he bonds with men and women in uniform, they share this devotion to history as a living force. Schama trains his rhetorical guns on the conviction that the US happily gorges on war. He visits the ultra-bright cadets of West Point, talks to disgruntled veterans of Iraq, and defends the Founding Fathers' ideal of armed services not as predators or kingmakers but "engineers of democracy".

From the Meigs dynasty of career soldiers to the Hispanic officers who now grumble about "politically driven" wars, Schama's soldiers go into battle with heavy, and often broken, hearts. Especially now, he finds little gung-ho militarism. Even in the army town of Oklahoma City, "The number of bereaved families was shocking, and yet there was no sense of 'Exterminate the towel-heads who did this to my boy and my girl'."

Back to American paradox again: the land of the peaceable warrior and the xenophobic immigrant never stops surprising Schama. Aptly, his trail of the unexpected ends in Las Vegas. There he meets not hustlers or high-rollers but the environmentalist, Pat Mulroy, whose unlikely task it is to turn the gaudy dream town green. Her plans for the conservation of precious water in the desert bring to a head Schama's timeliest theme: the tension between the spenders – apostles of a "national entitlement to plenty" – and the savers, who grasp that even the land of Manifest Destiny must learn to live within limits. "How bizarre is it! She was so proud of Las Vegas's ecological responsibility, with every reason. And she knew how mad the place was as a habitat. How fantastically American! It was so bloody counter-intuitive."

Schama suspects that his "counter-intuitive" America may startle us all over again. If Obama is elected, the rest of the world may have a shock. "I don't know what they expect from him, but the notion that then there'll be Nelson Mandela or something will not happen. They have to understand that he's an intense American patriot". In Afghanistan, "he will run that war very, very hard; harder than Bush – and the world may not like that."

Beyond US shores, the Obama cult proves that the anti-Americanism of the Bush-Cheney years hid a thwarted love. Now, outsiders' passionate curiosity has returned. "That's a lucky thing for America," says one who never lost it. "You could say that America has brought so much good to the world, along with so much brutality and misery, that it has earned its fortune in wanting to be admired again."

'The American Future: a history' (Bodley Head, £20) is out now. The accompanying four-part BBC2 series begins tonight at 9pm

How to book your festival tickets: The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival

The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival began yesterday and continues until Sunday. Simon Schama will be speaking at the festival on Sunday at 12.30pm. The box office is located at Woodstock Town Hall (Saturday, 07884 060 334) and at the Orangery, Blenheim Palace (Friday and Sunday, 07788 997 114)