In the course of his ramble through the derivations in the American dictionary, Bill Bryson dismantles most of the clichés of the making of America. The Pilgrim Fathers were a bedraggled collection of incompetents who landed far from Plymouth Rock. Washington never chopped down his father’s cherry tree. The Liberty Bell did not sound on 4 July 1776. If it had, it would have made a meaningless jangle. The Declaration of Independence had been agreed on the 2nd and the last signature was added four years later. The Gettysburg Address was a hopeless failure described by the Chicago Times as ‘the silly, flat, dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent observers as the President of the United States’.

Bryson’s book is a scream. There is an inclination among professional historians to dispatch Jeeves for the sal volatile at the sight of history traced through a series of weird tales and eccentricities. The study of the past turns to an escalating series of comic-book fixes. Outside universities, no one could care less about monastic rolls in fourteenth- century Kent. What we do care about is fun. The bizarre makes the past memorable.

I will not now forget that Thomas Edison pioneered direct current electricity. If Bryson had written my physics textbook, I would even understand how electricity works. His description of Edison’s attempts to discredit George Westinghouse by using his rival’s alternating current for America’s first electrical execution recalls Terry-Thomas at his most caddish.

The field of linguistic derivation gives endless scope for the odd. I may be alone in those over the age of consent in still laughing at the idea of Cardigan inventing the sandwich and Sandwich inventing the cardigan. Made in America expands the field with a stream of near-misses in nomenclature. The USA herself might have been called ‘Allegania’ or ‘Fredonia’. Bryson suggests the latter would have meant a nation of ‘Fredes’. I prefer to think of them as ‘Freds’ – ‘Freds launched a bombing raid on Libya in the early hours of this morning from bases in East Anglia’; ‘Hi there, I’m a Fred.’ Among the suggestions considered for the title of the Head of State were ‘His Mightiness’, ‘His Magistracy’ and ‘His Supremacy’. One of Edison’s more charming proposals – that a subscriber should answer the telephone with a jaunty ‘Ahoy!’ – never, unfortunately, took off, though I am reviving the practice in Peckham.

The origins of words, events and institutions are more often haphazard than planned. The motto for the United States – ‘e pluribus unum’ – was lifted from a Virgilian recipe for salad. Americans drive on the right because drivers of the original covered wagons sat on the left to reach the brake. The Irish potato famine, and the huge emigration that followed, was the disastrous result of massive potato incest – all European potatoes came from two breeding plants. The danger of a book like this is that at times it can degenerate into a list of the bizarre and the esoteric – a sort of ‘Would You Believe It?’ on ice. Some of the links creak. Chapters start with ‘And on to drinking…’ and ‘And so to military matters…’ At times, Bryson’s insistence on giving the derivation of each word as it arises becomes a disjointed slog. But this is carping on the fringes. Overall, the book is a triumph. Bryson carries it off by his joie de vivre, his unadorned prose and the sheer width of his snooping beneath the skin of the American Dream. If Made in America has a fault, it is that, at the end, Bryson begins to take himself and his analysis seriously. Suddenly, in the closing chapter, the writer pops up with his view of a sunlit American future – of the Freds riding off into an eternal sunrise of vibrant prosperity. Of course he is right to dismiss the gloomy white-supremacist forecasts of disastrous racial dilution. However, the prophets of inner-city doom and disintegration and of environmental disaster have at least as good a case as Bryson with his faith in exponential and unending material prosperity. Perhaps in the end the one message from both academic and comic-book history is that there is no such thing as a history lesson.