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).
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.