HeyJaredHoffmann on History
Hello—I’m Dr. Nic Hoffmann, a historian and teacher. This year, I’m publishing short historical essays three times a week. Mostly American history, always story-driven, curious, and a little off the rails.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 20
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 21, 2026
Latest issues
Why Most Historical Fiction Fails (opens the original)
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I don’t hate alternate history.Let’s just get that out of the way.In fact, I probably like it more than most people who complain about it, because I understand what it’s supposed to do. When historians engage in what we call counterfactuals—those “what if” scenarios that tweak a battle here or a decision there—it’s not because we want to rewrite the past. It’s because we’re trying to understand how fragile it was.What if D-Day fails?What if the Germans break through at the Battle of the Bulge?Wh
I Made My Students Fix Epcot (opens the original)
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Last week I told a room full of American Experience students that Walt Disney World’s American Adventure pavilion is, and I quote myself here, “a muddled mess of elementary school civics.” Then I told them their job for the week was to build a better one.This wasn’t a random bit — it came directly out of something I’d written about here already: how the American pavilion went from Buckminster Fuller domes and 360-degree Disney-made films in the 1950s and 60s, built for actual World’s Fairs and i
The Utopia That Became a Brownstone (opens the original)
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Here’s a fact I like to lead with: the most recognizable brand on the planet, after the McDonald’s golden arches, is a cartoon mouse who exists because a television network stole another cartoon rabbit.Walt Disney’s first real character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. NBC took him. So Disney invented a replacement — a mouse he wanted to call Mortimer, until his wife told him that was a terrible name and he should go with Mickey instead. That’s the whole empire, right there at the root of it: a guy
What They Actually Want to Know (opens the original)
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My school held Mass today, which it doesn’t do every Wednesday, so it threw off my whole rhythm before I’d even gotten to class. Light day, schedule-wise — just Podcasting, all technical troubleshooting as usual, and Contemporary History. But that second class ended up being the one worth writing about.I always open with the same ritual: floor’s open, what’s going on in the world, ask me anything. Most days that gets me a scattered handful of questions. Today the entire period got eaten — democr
The Tennessee Quick Step (opens the original)
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