The Washington Post (June 27) – In “The Heartland,” Kristin L. Hoganson, a professor of history at Illinois, tackles one of America’s most common national myths, impossible to miss in political speeches, electoral forecasts and endless dissections of the white working class. “Americans persist in imagining a heart,” Hoganson writes. “Beset by disunity, they imagine their nation as a body with a protected, essential core: the heartland.”