History is not a process of free association; nor can historical injustices be rectified by banishing offensive artifacts from view. History is a discipline—a gathering of evidence to reconstruct the past and a critical exploration of its contradictions and complexities. If there is a single unifying theme in American history, it is this nation’s ongoing struggle to live up to its founding ideals—a struggle that has played out on the battlefield, in the courtroom, in the political process, and in the shaping of popular sensibilities.
.. But the rapid-fire lyrics of hip-hop in Hamilton manage to evoke the fast-and-furious pamphleteering through which ideas were disseminated during the founding period, as well as the long historic provenance of those ideas.
.. The amendment process established under Article V yielded the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, and other attempts to create “a more perfect union” over successive generations.
.. The “dead white men” of the founding generation are portrayed as complex, imperfect individuals by a largely non-white cast. Color-blind casting this is not.
.. Act One’s Marquis de Lafayette, that great friend of revolutionary America, becomes the Francophile Thomas Jefferson in Act Two.
.. This is called “doubling” in the theater, and in this case, doubling works to personify the transfer of American ideals from war to peace, rebellion to governance.
.. “The World Turned Upside Down” had become part of American apocrypha, as it was said that Lord Cornwallis’s troops grimly sang the song as their commander surrendered at Yorktown. While it is doubtful that this actually happened, the significance would not have been lost on earlier generations of Americans.
.. Hamilton is at its best when it addresses just how improbable it was that the American experiment survived its first few decades.
.. “Winning was easy,” Washington tells Hamilton. “Governing’s harder.”
.. Hamilton was mindful that future generations would judge him by what was written about him during his own lifetime, so he spared no ink in challenging his detractors. When a blackmail scheme surrounding his marital infidelities threatened to destroy his reputation, he did what any modern PR guru would recommend: He preempted his enemies by confessing the scandal, publishing details of the sordid episode in a pamphlet.
.. Miranda omits Hamilton’s final excruciating hours during which he pled for last rites from an Episcopal bishop, who doubted that his was a soul worthy of redemption. The bishop eventually relented, and one of Hamilton’s final acts was to forgive Burr.
.. By this account, it is not enough for the historian to attempt to reconstruct the past and understand it on its own terms. Rather, the historian has a moral responsibility to condemn the past and its role as the progenitor of present injustices. The historiographical focus turns from sweeping narratives, which are characterized as triumphalist or morally obtuse, to narrow accounts of disenfranchised peoples—subjects worthy of study to be sure, but not to the exclusion of all else.
.. The crowning achievement of Hamilton is that it encourages the audience to treat the past not as a moral affront to the present, but as a challenge to it. It forces the audience to view the founding generation as neither heroes nor villains
Hamilton Reminds Us Why His Face Is on Our Money
But there’s a broader point here: When a great story such as Hamilton is received by a general audience, people who were reared on public-school revisionist history may come to understand why many still believe this Dead White Man is worthy of veneration.