Always far more special in London than in Washington, the so-called Anglo-American (a.k.a. UK-US) special relationship has greatly influenced British foreign policy for at least seven decades, and it continues to influence it under the conditions of ‘Brexit’ and the radical presidency of US President Donald Trump. In this paper, I examine the cultural underpinning of this exceptionally durable foreign policy phenomenon by looking at how 'America’ was constructed in British history textbooks from the late 1940s onwards.