I am planning on writing a book on what america could have been like if some events were different in it's history. However, I don't know where to start. Does anyone have any novels, films, or anything else that might help me?

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That's fiction, not non-fiction. You could write it in the style of a non-fiction book like a textbook, but it'd still be fiction. I would study the real history, and pick out specific events. Then ask yourself 'what if _____ happened instead?' (A recent episode of Futurama was an alternate history of America in which Britain defeated them, for example.) Edited for stupid typo.

Well...first you play the "what if" game and find the right scenario. What part of history excites you the most? Are you a Civil War guy, or more of a Vietnam chap? Or are you an old school Revolution person? Pick something really specific, for instance: "What if America lost the Revolution?" You'd want to research the Revolution very carefully, find out just where we could have lost and how England could've beaten us. After that, it takes some fudging. Read some history books about the era and ask yourself "if x didn't happen, what else wouldn't have happened?" In the case of the Revolution, we wouldn't have written a constitution or elected Washington president. The main leaders of the Revolution would have been hanged for treason and Benedict Arnold would've been a hero. There's no right or wrong with this because it didn't really happen, so there's not a lot of sources. There's only clever and less clever. An obvious examples of alternate history comes from Inglorious Basterds. The TV show Fringe also has a sort of alternate history trope, and Oliver Stone has a film where the premise is: what if Lee Harvey Oswald HAD been tried?