The inauguration of President Andrew Jackson got completely out of hand. In contrast to the decorous and tightly controlled festivities for next week's inauguration of Barack Obama, the celebrants in 1829 took matters into their own hands. A vast crowd mobbed the new President, who was forced to escape on horseback up Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowd procee-ded to the White House and gate-crashed the inaugural party, a “rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping ... cut glass and china to the amount of several thousand dollars had been broken in the scramble to get to the refreshments”.

The rowdiest inauguration in history gave, as David Reynolds wryly notes, a new definition of the “sovereignty of the people”, but it was also a reflection of the raw exuberance of American democracy, a central theme in this brilliant, accelerated road trip through American history.

Nearly two centuries after the Washington boys stormed the White House and drank all the President's wine, the country remains young, for it is America's peculiar genius to be able to look in the mirror and see, despite the ravages of time and disappointment, a still-youthful nation looking back, comely and confident. “The youth of America is their greatest tradition,” said Wilde. “It has been going on now for 300 years.”

For Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge, America's sense of eternal youth can be traced back to the entwined beliefs in liberty and empire that have shaped the country since its inception, bolstered by an intense faith, religious and political.

Empire, liberty and faith may drive American history, but frequently in contradictory ways, for these concepts have meant radi-cally different things to different Americans at different times. As Professor Reynolds points out, “each one has proved richly, sometimes fatally, ambiguous”. Here was a nation conceived in liberty in opposition to British imperial tyranny, yet itself an imperial power, spreading inexorably westward by conquest, fulfilling a “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”.

The nation granted remarkable freedom to whites, but held millions of black people in extraordinary bondage. Here was an avowedly secular state, but home to a godly people, convinced of its mission to the world.

Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “empire of liberty” to describe his nation-in-progress, and the uneasy elision of the two ideas has continued ever since. “We are not an imperial power,” said George W. Bush as US troops marched into Baghdad “... we are a liberating power.”

The contradictions were apparent to those on the receiving end of this supposedly liberating empire. Reynolds quotes John Ross, the half-Scottish leader of the Cherokees driven into exile on the Trail of Tears. “We have been made to drink of the bitter cup of humiliation ... Our lives, our liberties, the sport of the white man.” The language would be familiar to Iraqi insurgents.

Reynolds can be sharp, particularly with those American leaders who found moral accommodation with slavery. “Their consciences were troubled but their lifestyles remained unchanged: they had become slaves to slavery.” Yet he never loses sight of the moral energy and fervent righteousness that underpins so much of US history, the legacy of evangelical Protestantism.

America: Empire of Liberty is published to coincide with the 90-part Radio 4 series written and presented by Professor Reynolds, and the writing style, punctuated throughout with the voices of the participants, owes something to radio. Packing all of American history into 643 pages and 90 radio programmes is a formidable achievement (would an American historian have had the chutzpah to try the same condensation with British history, I wonder?), yet the very pace of the narrative seems to fit with the epic, pell-mell sweep of the story while the smaller stories lend life and resonance, the anecdotal moments when history shifts.

Hopeless and courageous General Edward Braddock was killed in a French and Indian ambush in July 1755, and then buried in the middle of the road by his soldiers, who marched over his unmarked grave to prevent the body being exhumed as a war trophy. That calamity ushered in The Seven Years War, at the end of which France would be evicted from North America, and the shape of future America became visible.

Similarly, in 1848, a Swiss immigrant called John Sutter was handed some bits of yellow metal found at the site of the sawmill he was building in Northern California. Sutter did what any sensible person would do: he consulted an encyclopaedia, concluded that he had struck gold, and ushered in the Gold Rush.

In 2003 Tony Blair, desperately defending raw US power, insisted that history offered no precedent to events in Iraq: “There has never been a time,” he declared, “when a study of history provides so little instruction for the present day.” He was profoundly wrong, for only by understanding the strange intertwining of liberty, empire and faith can one see, in Professor Reynolds's words, where “this youthful old country may be going in the future”.

The earliest surviving document written by Abraham Lincoln is a crude four-line poem that somehow captures this America. Hands calloused from clearing virgin Indiana forest with his axe, with only 12 months of schooling, the young Abe scrawled in his notebook:

Abraham Lincoln

His hand and pen

He will be good

But God knows when.

America, Empire of Liberty: A New History by David Reynolds
Allen Lane, £30; 416pp Buy the book

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