(For rank outbursts: Twitter. For mere updates: Facebook. To book an interview or a speaking engagement: william dot hogeland at gmail dot com.)
I mostly write what I like to think of as dramatic, provocative history narratives and critical essays on music, culture, and historiography. I also give fun, politically timely talks to groups on various startling events and personalities in American history and culture.
This Web log records not very deeply considered reflections, written hastily, and bending toward a remark of mighty Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry,” where he refers to history as “that cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of men.” (That’s the excuse for ”poetics” in my subtitle.)
Themes: challenges to easy “consensus” readings of American history; unusual connections among founding events and current politics, especially at political extremes that get condemned, no doubt rightly enough, as hysterical, paranoid, fringe, and wingnut; critiques of banal liberalism; interesting problems (interesting to me, anyway) of writing sustained narrative; the up- and downsides of digital culture, in the humanities and everywhere else; relationships among read narrative and other kinds of performance; relationships between fiction and nonfiction.
My latest book is Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776 (Simon & Schuster), came out in its paperback version in the summer of 2011. My first book The Whiskey Rebellion is also out in paper from S&S. My Boston Review essays, on failings and falsification in U.S. public history, are collected in Inventing American History (MIT Press). To buy those books, please drop by a cozy local bookstore or a gigantic retail chain, or order at your favorite online bookseller. For press, media, and speaking events, please contact me: william dot hogeland at gmail dot com.
Oh: And “Hysteriography.” It’s a provisional title. I made it up, as a joke on “historiography,” with vague overtones of the kinds of moods I discern and am drawn to in American history. Then I found out it’s a real word. Words, actually: It can mean 1) the recording of uterine contractions during labor (that works OK for me, for this!); or 2) something regarding rhetoric that I cannot distill in a phrase, and which if I fully understood it, might work even better (rhetoric does happen to be part of what I meant by “poetics”).
WILLIAM HOGELAND
