On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary comes a groundbreaking history of patriotism and the question of how to love a country.

A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book welcome Emory visiting professor and author Dominic Erdozain in honor of his new book, To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America. Erdozain will appear in conversation with Patrick Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the venue.

This event will be in the Ground Floor Auditorium of Decatur Library, after the library has closed for the day. Please enter through the lower level, rear doors.

About the Book

As the battle over American democracy plays out on the country’s streets, Dominic Erdozain’s urgent, brilliant new book brings the longstanding tension between patriotism and freedom into sharp focus. Love of country, he shows, helped create the nation and forge a national identity, but it has also drawn lines over who gets to be an American and what the country will be. Americans waved goodbye to monarchy in 1776, but patriotism—and the near-religious sense of being a chosen people—offered its own slippery slope toward tyranny.

In To Love a Country, historian Dominic Erdozain shows how pride in America as the world’s leading democracy has frustrated the nation’s foundational promises. Through rigorous research and candid storytelling, he reveals how the myth of American exceptionalism has fostered military aggression abroad, inequality at home, and the denial of freedom and civil discourse everywhere.

Yet more than an illuminating examination of the past, To Love a Country is also a story of hope for the future. It is a moving reflection on how to maintain faith in the American promise in a time of division and despair. By learning from movements that have transcended borders and ideologies—and by listening to the voices of reformers like Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi—Erdozain leads the way to a renewed commitment to the values of liberty, equality, and justice.


About the Author

Dominic Erdozain is a historian and writer with a passion for bringing the past into dialogue with the present. Erdozain has written widely on the intellectual origins of democracy and published articles for CNN and Time. He is the author of One Nation Under Guns and a graduate of Oxford and Cambridge. He is currently a visiting professor at Emory University.

About the Conversation Partner

Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History. 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 eight lecture series with "The Great Courses" (www.thegreatcourses.com), including "The Art of Teaching” and, most recently, “The Industrial Revolution.”