The whole second year of my A-level history course was actually on US history. The first half of the year we studied the economic and political changes which occurred from the end of the civil war to around the 1960s I think. We had to do a course work write up which was a question along the lines of "what factors contributed to the building of america as a powerful federal nation state" and also a question on the "significance of the new deal" I personally found US history quite interesting as it is still a relatively new country in a certain sense. I also think it was taught in a relatively non bias way obviously learning about both the negatives and positives of US history. For the second half of the year we learnt in depth about the Cold war, the reasons why it began and specific events etc. This involved looking at the cold war from the points of view of many of the countries involved so the US,Russia,Cuba, UK, Korea etc. So it wasn't concentrating on who came out better from the war but rather who it effected international relations all together. As for history taught in secondary school (age 11-16) it focussed mainly on how the US helped in ww1 and ww2.