For your Thanksgiving fighting pleasure, no paywall: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/did-the-ir...

People argue about what finally brought the people of the thirteen colonies together, but my conclusion, from the story I tell in Declaration, is that nothing did. "A union of former colonies entered history in confusion about the nature and purpose of its independence."

Remembering DOGE: It's not that they failed to drain the swamp -- they are the swamp. Free post, from April: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/trumps-sha...

You all should read the piece but isn't that portrait invaluable, like Trump interviews from the '80s when he hadn't yet perfected the character and still used big words

This is the kind of thing I find funny: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/sidebar-be...

Get out of here if you don't know.

Free preview on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/sidebar-be...

I started reading Autumn of the Black Snake by William Hogeland, and it’s astounding how many royal governors, army officers, colonial legislators, etc. in the 1760’s were involved in dubious land schemes in the current Midwest

Everything I needed to find out about the American Revolution is in this book. www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Sch...

Those poor schmucks got one month's pay from Robert Morris before Yorktown. The most powerful American throughout the war, the whole time he'd dedicated all revenues, such as they were, to paying interest to rich bondholders, not soldiers.

No paywall, BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/did-the-ir...

Truth, Ruth.

One of the ways to look at the American Revolution from various Native pov is that it *was not* an explosive, history-changing kind of thing but an accelerating episode in an ongoing thirty-year war. The Shawnee pov would totally undermine the "globally most- important-event-ever" vibe.

This is the impossible truth. (It affects books too.)

As I remember it, *this* is the key point. The anti-Catholic thing played, obviously, especially for the Samuel Adams type, but wiping out a generational speculation in land was what revved up Virginians like Washington, drew them (certainly him!) to the cause, made the Quebec Act intolerable.

I will say working with Claire and Paul on that sequence was a pleasure. Total pros, handled being relegated to voiceover with a lot of grace, tough fact that not everybody has the stuff for on-camera. Coyote, I don't know, possibly a bit one-note (?), but nice collab all around.

There's a book about what really happened to bring about the Declaration of Independence. And it's pretty wild! www.amazon.com/Declaration-...

Free preview on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/why-im-a-w...

This was an excellent event.

Weird typo in the title now gone: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/in-a-natio...

Free post on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/the-past-i...

Free post on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/the-past-i...

Why I'm done with Hamilton and Jefferson, and with engaging with mainstream scholarship on them, and am instead writing a romp about Burr: open.substack.com/pub/williamh...

Free preview: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/in-a-natio...

Defining the opposition party (in real life quite lame and ineffectual) as demonically criminal is a throwback to the earliest days of the republic.

I've always thought this story would make a great dark comedy--and if that's what they're up to, I'll be surprised.

This is an excellent distinction.

Judge April Perry, getting it precisely wrong, when enjoining Trump: "Not even Alexander Hamilton could have envisioned one state's militia to be used against another state's residents because the president wants to punish those with views other than his own."

Free preview of my latest paying-subscriber exclusive on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/trump-the-...

This is a deeply disturbing article.

"can seem deeply uncool"

Jeffrey Rosen lead, in the Atlantic: "Shays’s Rebellion filled Alexander Hamilton with dread." No, he and his cohort were psyched that finally people might listen to them and create a national government with powers to suppress popular dissent from laws enriching the rich at the expense of the poor.

Free preview of my latest paying-subscriber exclusive on BAD HISTORY: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/trump-the-...

Presidents have gone over the heads of governors before on this issue--rarely, but they have--but not to violate the law, which is what the judge has ruled Trump is doing.

A problem is that President Washington got a bad-faith bite at precisely this apple in 1794. Edmund Randolph, then Secretary of State, objected to the rubberstamp certification by Justice Wilson, to no avail. John Yoo and others have looked there when defending the unitary executive concept.

"Landed" is active; "was pushed" is passive.

A BAD HISTORY paying-subscriber exclusive: "A Martyr to the Cause: Politics, Rage, and Mourning."https://williamhogeland.substack.com/p/a-martyr-to-the-cause

Ezra Klein is really out here claiming that the "Basket of Deplorables" speech was a bit of exclusion and intolerance that showed the Democrats had abandoned the broad inclusive vision of Barack "They Get Bitter, They Cling to Guns or Religion" Obama

Jefferson refers to newly passed amendments to Constitution in letter to GW on 9 Sept 1792 as "the bill of rights." #sschat founders.archives.gov/documents/Wa...

The thing about the problem of beauty is that it solves itself over time.

The problem is not people talking past each other on BlueSky, the problem is the DNC asking Ezra Klein what Sally wants.

Speaking of talking free speech when you're out and suppressing speech when you're in.

The Jefferson administration encouraged state prosecutions of newspaper editors who were critical of it.

Ooh, profanity. Guess he's really mad now.

HRC: "The new [confederation] system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs." Hence supposedly the Constitution Convention. But nobody at the convention was concerned with protecting the property of the poor.

It's not that Trump world has "picked up on" speech-is-harm ideology: authoritarians have always thought that.

BAD HISTORY, no paywall, on Bret Stephens's bogus bemoanings of the loss of good public argument in the context of the Kirk killing: williamhogeland.substack.com/p/breaking-b...

Since it's obvious, it doesn't in fact need to be said. Unless there's some other reason for repeatedly stating the obvious...?

They are going to tie themselves in pretzels trying to link lone-wolf violence to speech they don't like, and to use those paranoid fantasies to justify censorship.

She was threatening to prosecute companies that allow employees to withhold services from companies for political reasons. I don't know what basis she would have--Kirk stans aren't a protected class--but that's what she was saying.