The History of Hamilton

Upon reading, viewing, or listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton: The Revolution,” one may find the story compelling and the songs catchy, but wonder whether or not the storyline and characters are portrayed in a historically accurate way. Other Broadway musicals, such as “Les Miserables,” have a historical tone, and attempt to reveal some truth of a time in our past, or even of our present, such as through “Fun Home,” one could argue. However, “Hamilton: The Revolution” attempts to tell the origins of America more directly, and in an ultimately very accurate manner. Upon reading the text, as opposed to seeing the show on stage, one can read about the historical facts in the margins, with commentary from Miranda, and see that in fact the story and characterization of Alexander Hamilton are in line with many historical accounts. Miranda’s text was researched extensively and offers a number of different perspectives and considerations. Both the text and the commentary often do so in a very humorous way. For example, in “Cabinet Battle Number 1,” Miranda has Hamilton rap, “If we assume the debts, the Union get a new / line of credit, a financial diuretic” (161). While this lyric in and of itself is comical, Miranda’s footnote, which reads, “The first thing I did here was to look up the etymology of diuretic and make sure it existed in this era. Whew.” also adds a humorous tone (161). While comical, this footnote shows the extent to which Miranda researched in order to ensure accuracy. Although the accounts we have today of history that Miranda had to work with could, and likely are, in some ways flawed, Miranda did what he could to be factually correct.

In telling the story of Alexander Hamilton, as well as that of Burr and others, Miranda takes a very new approach. He writes the musical in a very modernist way, using rap and new forms of music and theatre, rather than the typical narratives offered to students in history classes. The final song of the musical repeatedly asks the question “Who tells your story?”. In this case, Miranda tells the story of the characters or people, and he does so very creatively. However, this question of “Who tells your story?” causes one to call into question the way in which other histories are told and will continue to be told. While some historians attempt to be unbiased and to include a diversity of different viewpoints in their accounts, others do not. Many history books, for example, will do much less fact checking than Miranda. They will tell the story the way that they want it to be told. When studying abroad in Berlin, we discussed this possibility of inaccurate historical accounts in my class on Totalitarianism and the Holocaust. My professor explained that in Germany today, historians and academics attempt to be as unbiased as possible. They tend to try to reveal the explicit truth of the Holocaust, regardless of the fact that many people throughout history have attempted to cover it up, in order to be fair and inclusive towards a variety of different perspectives, and to prevent another tragedy of this sort from ever happening again.

This afternoon during my service learning at Tunbridge, the teacher that I help discussed her frustrations with me about the way that history is often told. Today, she was teaching the 3^rd graders about the colonization of America. The students read a passage that told them that colonists came to North America from England, Holland, and France in order to escape religious persecution and to strive for riches, specifically through coal mining. The problem with this, the teacher felt, was that it failed to portray the whole truth. It failed to include the tragedy that the colonists caused in relationship to the Native Americans, for example, and was ultimately a biased account. However, the school would not allow her to tell history in the way that she felt was fair. Instead, she was required to follow the curriculum. This example demonstrates the ways in which history is not always told in the best way. Children, and all people do not always learn history in an unbiased manner, but for a number of reasons can see the stories of people in the past misrepresented. While history can be told through a textbook, a narrative, or even with rap lyrics in a musical, those telling the story must be sure to do so with accuracy, including a variety of different perspectives, which Miranda, in his musical in many ways does.