William Hogeland

It's time to let them go. A critique of "Professional Smart Guy (PSG)" Charles Murray's uncritical reading of Alexander Hamilton.

Essentializing the Delta-Chicago connection used to be a white-boy game.

An examination of Alex Pretti’s killing by ICE to challenge the idea that the Second Amendment safeguards liberty and deters government tyranny.

For a fight at Thanksgiving, bring that one up.

Trump is relying on a 1798 law with a bad history.

Ideas about history still prevailing in the liberal resistance to Trump keep pushing us backward.

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.

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.