Kristin Hoganson
Kristin Hoganson is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the history of the United States in world context, cultures of U.S. imperialism, and transnational history. Her recent research has taken her into the history of the rural heartland, with forays into topics such as the politics of locality, converging borderlands, imperial piggybacking, isolationism, aerial consciousness, diaspora, exile, and struggles for the right to return. Her monograph "The Heartland: An American History" was published in 2019. She is also the author of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998), Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (2007), and American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (2016).
FEATURED LECTURE
Hogtied: The Roots of the Modern American Empire
OAH Lectures by Kristin Hoganson
The term “flyover states” dismisses the Midwest as a place that can be literally looked down upon. It favors the vantage from the airplane window, suggesting that there is nothing to see down there but flatville. This talk flips the vantage point, illuminating how rural Midwesterners have understood their place in the world by looking up and out, starting with meterology and economic ornithology and moving on to barnstorming and early military aviation.
In this presentation, Kristin Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. She navigates the disconnect between history and myth, tracking both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the nation.
This lecture reconsiders the roots of the modern American empire by focusing on the history of the Berkshire hog – an animal that reveals some of the many ways that the United States piggybacked on the British Empire during its ascent to global power. This talk should also be of particular interest to anyone curious about the history of food.