A British native in love with the U.S.

Simon Schama is more than a man - he's a franchise.

The historian and media personality will power through Philadelphia this evening, appearing at the Free Library at 7:30 p.m. But the word historian misleads. The native Englishman, who has been a transatlantic for decades now, is University Professor of Art and Art History at Columbia University.

Schama's bespectacled face, feathered with tousled hair as he saunters through historical byways, also has become familiar in TV series that include the Emmy-winning BBC/PBS show The Power of Art. He's long been a mainstay on talk shows and in debates on issues such as Israel and the war in Iraq. He recently signed on as a contributing editor for the Financial Times ("With so many jobs," he says, "the crucial thing is to take another one"), and he's an author with a new book out, titled The American Future: A History.

With eloquence, wit, passion, and irony, American Future traces the history of an idea: that of our national destiny. It's a rare event: a book by a non-American author that is, in the author's own words, "in love with" the United States.

Over lunch in New York City recently, Schama reflected on the moment that sparked the book. At a 2005 dinner party, guests were discussing Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the presidency. "And then someone - in fact, it might have been Bill Moyers - said, 'Do you know, there's just a chance that this might be an election about something?' . . . And we all said, 'If it's about something, why doesn't [Barack] Obama give it a shot?'

"I'd wanted to do a project on American history for a long time," Schama says, "but I didn't want to do a one-volume, George-Washington-to-George-Bush book. So I thought, 'If this is really going to be an election that's a real rendezvous-with-destiny, crossroads election, why not take the four great themes of American history as I understand them and look back at the deep roots of all those issues?' "

Schama and America go back a long way. After sojourns at Cambridge and Oxford, he accepted a chair at Harvard in 1980. A slew of books followed, several gaining a wide popular audience. He came to Columbia in 1993, and from 1995 to 1998 wrote an art-criticism column for the New Yorker. He now lives in New York with his wife and children, although, as he says, "I've told my children to throw me off Westminster Bridge" in London when he's dead.

He became a multimedia star by invitation. In 2000, the BBC asked him to create a series on British history, which became the acclaimed A History of Britain. A four-part series (the counterpart to his new book) titled The American Future aired on the BBC in January. His film on the poet John Donne is soon to appear on BBC, and two further America films are in progress - one on "morals and money," the other which asks: Is the "American century" ending?

The stunning first sentence of The American Future is: "I can tell you exactly, give or take a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there . . . " Where was he? The Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, 2008, when Obama beat all comers. It was a moment, he writes, when "everything contemporary seemed full of history."

From there, Schama addresses four great themes: the debate over war and a standing army; our continuing struggle with religious diversity and inclusiveness; race, immigration, and national identity; and our changing ideas about the incredible abundance (and now, endangerment) of our natural resources.

American Future is a book of beautiful writing, peppered with wisecracks, slashed with rapier thrusts. There's the Clinton campaign captain with "a faint but perceptible sigh of disgust moving through her sweater." We see "Thomas Jefferson . . . still working to make America rational. Good luck; it never hurts to try." We meet a failed president at a photo-op, "like a stand-up comic sweating through a tough house on a Monday night in Milwaukee."

Sometimes, as with activist Fannie Lou Hamer, Schama takes on his subject's voice: "She knew why she had to get on that bus and it wasn't because no out-of-state kids who'd come to Mississippi had told her to. No, sir. . . . "

Isn't this all rather risky? Schama says: "It's America's fault. Thank God, it's America's fault." He recounts discovering Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and other American writers as a schoolboy, "and they sounded nothing like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, or Dickens, an entirely different kind of English, with its own life and its own muscle." That discovery, he says, stoked his own inventiveness as a writer.

Simon Schama is not objective when it comes to America. "Thank you for noticing," he says. "I've been living here for a long time, and I love it." Throughout his book runs the sense that Americans are good at fetching new ideas - from the Constitution to Google - out of unpromising prospects. That is why, as he writes in American Future, "It is never sensible to give up on America."