Local People of Distinction

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A. William Hoglund. Historian

"Born in 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, Arthur William Hoglund spent his childhood on a farm Spencer-Van Etten in upper New York state where his parents Arthur and Sigrid purchased land with a number of other Finnish immigrants. His sister, Thelma, was born in 1927 and passed away in 1946 at age 18 when her car crashed into the river in Elmira, NY. After Hoglund graduated from Spencer High School in 1945, he studied History at Cornell University (B.A. '49) and at the Univeristy of Wisconsin in Madison (M.A. '50, PhD '57). From 1954 to 1956 he was a Private in the Army, stationed at Ft. Dix in New Jersey. His PhD dissertation was eventually published in 1960 and was on Finnish Immigrants. Hoglund taught history at Muskingum College, Ohio starting in 1957, but in 1961 he joined the History Department at the University of Connecticut in Storrs where his stayed for the remaineder of his career, until 1997.

Among many other published works, he is the author of the "Finnish Immigrants in America, 1880-1920" (1960), "Union list of Finnish newspapers published by Finns in the United States and Canada, 1876-1985" (1985) and "Immigrants and their children in the United States : a bibliography of doctoral dissertations, 1885-1982" (1986). He curated the 1992 Library of Congress exhibition "Bearers of the Word: Finnish Immigrant Literature in America 1876-1992." Hoglund published under the name A. William Hoglund but went simply by William or Bill throughout his life.

Hoglund passed away in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in May 2008. He was survived by his partner, Kaz Takahashi."

Obituary from University Of Minnesota, A. William Hoglund https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/6/resources/4915

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