Dismantling the cult of personality created around the founding era’s plutocratic foe of democracy.
Taking a bow: Lin-Manuel Miranda (center) and the cast of Hamilton perform at the Tony Awards in New York City.
(Evan Agostini / Invision/AP)
The fact that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton was the biggest American cultural phenomenon in the first quarter of the 21st century is so banal that it’s easy to forget. The show no longer dominates public reflections on politics, the arts, history, vacation travel, sports, food, and anything else it might be forced to connect to. But the production itself is still running on Broadway after 11 years, while tours continue to bring it to new cities here and around the world. Even leaving aside subsidiary rights and merchandising, the revenue from the stage production of a show about a man whose career began with the American Revolution has reached more than $1 billion . The original cast recording—the all-time best-selling album in that genre—has sold more than 10 million copies and spent more than 500 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart. For sheer mass appeal, there’s rarely been anything like Hamilton .
What makes the Hamilton phenomenon something more, and other, than a record-breaking commercial entertainment, though, is the roughly six-year period of constant public reference to it and its subject, which began in 2015 and accelerated during the first Trump administration. Taken entirely for granted after all these years is the one thing that was nearly unthinkable when the show first exploded into life: This was a hip-hop-influenced musical starring people of color, and it was about the life and times of… Alexander Hamilton?
About who? No!
Yes! None other than Alexander Hamilton. The political class, the media, the commentariat, and the American-history profession had little choice but to start doing backflips.
The moment had been teed up, around the turn of the millennium, by the “founders chic” craze in commercial publishing. (Ron Chernow’s best-selling biography Alexander Hamilton , published in 2004, inspired the musical .) But that was just a niche market of dad books; this was the irresistible force of American pop. And Lin-Manuel Miranda’s inventive adaptation of Chernow’s book aggressively drew on American pop’s long-standing involvement with the struggles of Black people in America. That, combined with the project’s setting, a historical period beloved by the middlebrow and the highbrow alike, swept almost everybody into its vortex. From the White House, first lady Michelle Obama pronounced Hamilton “the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life.” The eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote that Miranda had embarked on a path involving “immense intellectual and historical work” and framed the play in terms of Stoic and other philosophical traditions. The talk-show host Jimmy Fallon testified that seeing the musical “changed my life.”
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In some sectors of the scholarly early-American-history community, standards of intellectual independence and critical distance, supposedly crucial to scholarship, took a back seat to joyous celebration. In 2016, the venerable Society for Historians of the Early American Republic declared itself thrilled to feature, at its annual conference’s plenary session, normally reserved for panels exploring pretty abstruse matters, an interview with Miranda. Given his schedule, Miranda himself couldn’t be there. The professors instead watched a filmed interview, which included responses to questions they’d been invited to submit in advance of the shooting. With the profession high on this unforeseeable boost for its subject matter, historians who did look askance at the show’s rhetorical strategies and political and social resonances were asked by both lay people and colleagues to lighten up: This wasn’t a history lesson, but an inspiring work of historical theater. (Did you pedants and killjoys ever hear of Shakespeare, for God’s sake?)
At the same time, the Hamilton furor decidedly was a history lesson. In collaboration with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the show’s creators and producers took their explosive success as an opportunity to launch a massive educational effort , called “EduHam,” featuring Hamilton-centric curricula disseminated by the institute and adopted by history teachers throughout the country.
Hamilton ’s America: President Barack Obama meets with Lin-Manuel Miranda in the West Wing of the White House in March 2016.
In that heady process, something strange happened to Alexander Hamilton. Not the hero of the musical—the member of the founding generation.
He’d had his moments before. In the typical American-history survey course, Hamilton has persistently been paired with Thomas Jefferson to represent two conflicting yet equally fundamental tendencies in American government; when one’s been in, the other’s been out. It’s fair to say that the Jefferson…
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