A Meta-Discussion About American History w/ William Hogeland

On this edition of Parallax Views, we celebrate the 4th of July by having critical meta-discussion about American history and how it is constructed with the one and only William Hogeland, popular historian and author of such books as Autumn of the Black Snake, Declaration, Founding Finance, and The Whiskey Rebellion. In the course of our conversation we discuss his new blog Hogeland's Bad History on Substack and take a deep dive into problems related to how everyday American citizens and serious historians alike look at U.S. history. In particular we talk about the wave of calls for historians to play a more vital role in political discourse in light of the rise of Trumpism, the problems with the sentiments of "Ask a Historian", the debate over how history should be taught in school now summed up in the conversation over CRT or Critical Race Theory (although the use of CRT may be a misnomer), Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton and the case of Hamiltonmania that has been sweeping the nation, the age old Republic Vs. Democracy debate about the nature of U.S. government, whether or not it may be more useful to look at what the U.S. Founding Father did rather than what they wrote or said, Constitutional originalism in both its right-wing and liberal forms, and much, much more!