Patrick Allitt, Emory's Cahoon Family Professor of American History, was born and raised in England. He was an undergraduate at Oxford in England (1974-1977), a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley (Ph.D., 1986), and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and Princeton University. At Emory since 1988, he teaches courses on American intellectual, environmental, and religious history, on Victorian Britain, and on the Great Books.  

Author of seven books (most recently A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism,2014), he is also presenter of twelve lecture series with “The Great Courses,” most recently “The Great Tours: England, Scotland and Wales” and “How Railways Transformed the World.”  His wife, Toni, is a Michigan native and their daughter Frances is an Emory graduate (class of 2010) who now lives in England.

View Dr. Allitt's bio.

The title of the lecture series is The History of American Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century, and he will focus on the following topics

1. Theodore Roosevelt and the idea of an American colonial empire.
2. How the United States Became Involved in World War I.
3. World War II and the End of Isolationism.
4. The Cold War, and Why the US won it Without a Nuclear War.

The sessions will look at vital decisions made by presidents, especially the two Roosevelts and Truman, changing ideas about what America’s role in the world ought to be and whether these ideas corresponded with reality as well as the history of military leaders (Eisenhower, Patton, Westmoreland, etc.) and the role of public opinion in changing foreign policy approaches.

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