William Hogeland

People who study the past don’t always have special insight into politics. Recent events have made that crystal clear.

It's easy to get this one wrong.

On the folly of relying on history to settle the debate over whether the Fourteenth Amendment should bar Trump from office.

A bad history.

1796, the first contested presidential election.

Whole states of the Union owe their very existence to nothing more nation-building than 19th-Century pols’ wanting to add new senators to one side of the aisle.

The Folkies and WWII, Part Two.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

"The New York Times" as the world's most exhausted professor.

The bad history in Alito’s draft overturning Roe v. Wade.

Why are so many songs of the Confederacy indelibly inscribed in my Yankee memory?

Congress hasn't declared it often. The U.S. has fought a lot of war anyway. How?

Why songs of the southland are really northern.

While New York has yet to break away from the rest of the country, it's not for lack of trying.

Are the truths in the Declaration of Independence really self-evident?

Inside the profession, the battle over the 1619 Project continues.

The U.S. Constitution was the reason for Madison and Hamilton's breakup.

Reflections on the latest public debate between historians about the causes of the American Revolution.

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia.

Just because the filibuster wasn't created to promote racial slavery doesn't mean there’s no good argument against it.

From Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon and more: meddling, fixing, rigging, fraud, and violence.

How not to learn about the American past.

The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress.

The National Statuary Collection announced the unification of the former slave economy’s emotional heartland with the heart of national government.