The greatest of human adventures

If you want to read a history of America that isn't biased, isn't academic and yet is tremendously optimistic while revealing all our warts, please read Paul Johnson's "A history of the American people." Here's his opener:
"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." p.3

Johnson doesn't have to answer to a tenure review committee in the hopelessly left sided university community, and he's not a part of the notoriously liberal American media.  He's a British journalist who has been visiting and researching the U.S. since his first visit in 1955.  Despite its 3.5 lbs and 1000+ pages and  about that many footnotes, this book is for the ordinary reader, not a scholar.  You can tell, however, that he is a conservative in that as a former Socialist familiar with socialism's failures, he is solidly in favor of a free market economy as the system that brings the most people up out of poverty and enslavement; but also he is incredibly optimistic, which liberals almost never are.  He's not snarky or dark in his evaluations even when explaining (and footnoting) John Kennedy's or Lyndon Johnson's numerous affairs and sexcapades, or finding the one really good thing about Jimmy Carter's presidency. He outlines rather carefully the media making the presidency for us in 1960, and although in 1997 he'd never heard of Barack Obama, the same template was used again in 2008.

I found this wonderful Booknotes interview with Johnson in 1998.  Loved that show.

Johnson notes that left wing liberals and academicians will hate this book--they won't actually read it, but will find factual errors (he encourages that you report these so he can correct them in the next edition but also notes that even sources he cites disagree on details).