HOGELAND'S BAD HISTORY

The unhappy news of the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s recent suicide in the face of academic scandal—a situation I have no take on, you’ll be happy to know—has raised familiar issues regarding standards in scholarship and revived the somewhat bleak impression, forced on me over these past twenty-plus years, of the sheer uselessness of U.S. history scholarship’s modes of handling evidence and citing sources.

It’s time for a short break, so I’m pausing the billing on your BAD HISTORY subscriptions for the month of August and won’t be posting any exclusives until September. Have a good month!

What do the journalists and commentators Ryan Grim, Matthew Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Ben Dreyfuss have in common? One thing, and one thing only: getting Aaron Burr wrong. Holding varying and opposing viewpoints on most matters, they agree more or less reflexively on the sleaziness, cynicism, even the villainy of Burr. I think that phenomenon reflects a longstanding problem in how today’s intelligentsia views the U.S. founding period’s governing elite in general.

I think it’s true, what the historian Nancy Isenberg says (I’m paraphrasing): Aaron Burr, known today mainly for killing Alexander Hamilton and being a character in a musical, had an unusual susceptibility in real life to serving as a screen on which people projected their fantasies, some of those fantasies pretty wild. During his lifetime, people eithe…

In late 2024, as The New York Timesrecently reported, Humphrey Barclay was going through a collection of old family papers he’d been storing in his apartment in London when he came across documents received by his 18th Century ancestor David Barclay, Jr., a British merchant closely tied to government and involved in trade with the American colonies.

A recent story in The New York Times Magazine got my attention by showcasing one of my pet peeves. The online headline was “Ode to the New York Dive Bar: Is the Beer Cheap? Is the Bathroom Scary?” Online subhead: “Dive bars have a rich history, but they face an uncertain future with rising costs and changing social patterns.”

I’m linking below to a revised version of a post I sent out the other day, as a paying-subscriber exclusive, on Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of Danielle Allen’s book Radical Duke, and I’m also temporarily unlocking it, so now all subscribers have access.

A weird but revealing article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker discusses the historian Danielle Allen’s new book Radical Duke, under the headline “Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution?” The answer to that question is a firm “No,” and while I find it hard to believe that Danielle Allen’s thesis is “Yes,” Gopnik’s certainly is. S…

María Corda in “The Private Life of Helen of Troy” (1927) As you may have heard, there’s a high-end movie adaptation of The Odyssey on the way, directed by Christopher Nolan, with Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, who, in the poem, and in the mythology the poem is based on, is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Front-page and just above the fold (yes, I get the print version), under the kicker “News Analysis,” today’s New York Times presents this headline: “Founders Had a Blind Spot, and Trump Is Exposing It.” The piece is about the absence of checks on executive power in this country, and it’s true generally, of course, that the Trump presidencies have taken every one of the many inherently crappy things about our system of government to such unbearable extremes that the inherent crappiness has now...