Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- The optimism once held by many Americans has been "beaten out" of them amid a lagging economy, threat of terrorism and two ongoing wars, according to a professor at Emory University.





"All of those things ... have made people start to be much more doubtful than they used to be," says Patrick Allitt, a British citizen who teaches American history.





Allitt recently wrote about what he describes as "America the miserable" -- the mood swing he has seen in his 30 years in the U.S. -- for The Spectator, a British magazine.





Read the professor's full essay





Allitt spoke with CNN about his perspective. Below is a transcript of that conversation, which has been edited:





CNN: How would you describe the change in America since you first came to America?





Allitt: The change is this: I don't get the same sense of intense self confidence as I used to feel when I first came to America, even though that was a period that's usually remembered as a pretty grim time -- the Jimmy Carter years when there was a lot of stagnation and inflation and a general feeling of malaise. Even so, to me, it seemed incredibly energetic here. People in America worked much, much harder than they did in Britain. They seemed more upbeat. They had faith in progress. And there was this feeling of being intensely wide awake for the first time. But now, I think some of that optimism has been beaten out.





Counter: Why there's reason for optimism





It's been a very tough 10 years since 2001, hasn't it? The attack on the World Trade Center, the growing fear of terrorism, the difficulty of prevailing in the wars, obviously, more recently the recession. All of those things, collectively, have made people start to be much more doubtful than they used to be.





CNN: Do you attribute it to a change in American mentality or are we exposed to an array of different beliefs through the ever-expanding media landscape?





Allitt: It's certainly true there are far more media than there used to be ... that devote a lot of time to people who are dissatisfied. In other words, if somebody's happy, that isn't news. It's certainly news when they become dissatisfied in some way or they have some kind of problem to deal with. In that sense, I suppose there's an inherent bias in favor of bad news.





But I think it's more than that. I've spent most of the last 30 years in the company of academics, who also tend to be pessimistic people. They tend to have very high ideals for America. When they see it doesn't live up to its ideals, it makes them disappointed and sometimes embittered. So it may be that, if I spent more time with less educated people, I wouldn't have this sense quite so acutely.





I think that's quite possible.





CNN: You write: "The decline of American confidence isn't just a temporary blip on the screen brought on by the recession." Elaborate on that for me.





Allitt: Even before this recession began, I guess it was in October and November 2008 when things really started to go bad. Already by then, I was having a feeling that the general national optimism was less emphatic than it used to be.





In the first five or six years of the last decade, there was this feeling that things were going wrong, particularly that the wars were grinding on interminably and that it was very difficult to prevail. It wasn't the same kind of decisive conflict as World War II where you're fighting against a nation-state and you can clearly detect when you're winning. The dispersal of the enemy and the very shadowy character of terrorism tends to be very depressing to confront. You have to maintain a high degree of vigilance and sometimes you have to take comfort in thinking what's extraordinary is what didn't happen; there wasn't another major attack.





That doesn't feel like a victory.
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