American History Hit - The Real Hamilton: An American Myth?

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

11 Tonys, a Grammy, a Pulitzer Prize and broken box office records - there's no denying the impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton.Throughout this series on the real Hamilton, we have been trying to uncover the man the musical is based on. But how much of the show and its production is truthful? And how much does this matter?Renee Romano joins Don to look into this new American Myth. Renee is a writer, historian and professor, and one of the editors of 'Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past'. She can be found here.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. As the lights dim and the curtains close on this Hamiltonian drama, the audience sits in the dark in a moment of awed and bewildered silence. It has been an epic production, this Patriots' single lifetime, one that for a while there seemed to be going so well until suddenly it wasn't.

That ending sure took us by surprise. Hatchy, tentative claps are heard as we urge our stiff knees back to life. But then the smattering applause builds. As Rose rise up and the whole theater suddenly bursts into bravos and a long-standing ovation. What else to do with this life of such supreme achievement? But beneath the cheers is a lingering doubt. Unanswered questions, conflicted emotions. What was the message here? How do we judge this convoluted plot about this complicated man?

A founding father, unfounded by so many trials and triumphs and tragedy. Do we celebrate his brilliant civic genius? Hail the prowess of his fiscal programs. Embrace his vision of a republic in which public finance is the glue that binds us together. Is it? Does it? Really? Hello again. It's American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. We bring you today the final installment

of our four-part series on the real Alexander Hamilton. Founding father, husband, soldier, lover, dueler, guiding force of our early republic. Our framers are all partly mythologized, minted on money, monumented in marble. But none before has inspired quite the Broadway brouhaha of Alexander Hamilton, who has blown up over the last decade. But how much has this popularity stayed true to his real story? What is fact and what is fiction? And did Hamilton, the musical hit, hit its mark, or miss it? For the next half hour or so, I'm joined by Professor Renee Romano. She's an author and co-editor of historians on Hamilton, how a blockbuster musical

is re-staging America's past. Renee also sits upon the board of directors of National History Day with me, pleased and proud of that. Renée, Professor Romano, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. This is a very unusual conversation we're going to have, because we're talking about history, of course. We're talking about Hamilton, but we're talking about the effect of what the recent phenomenon that is really Hamilton is all about and how the sort of his legacy is being retold. Is that fair to say? Yeah. This is really a project about historical memory, which is when we think about history, you know, there's what's happened in the past and there's the stories we tell ourselves about the past. And many of those stories are not being told just in academic text or in college classrooms.

They're being told in our landscape. They're being told on our TV shows. They're being told in music, they're being told in a variety of ways when we learn about the past. So this project was to interrogate what is this representation of the past? Why is it so popular? What kind of cultural or political work is it doing? Right. And we think about representations of the past, they can do cultural and political work. So I was particularly interested in Hamilton because it's pretty rare to get a representation of a lesser-known founding father playing on Broadway, which is a pretty elitist space, being as massively popular as this musical has been. So that question of, what does that popularity tell us about how people are thinking about history? And how will it

shape how we think about history was what really animated my interest in the musical and the project. In a way, it is what happens with all of history, but this is just a hyperbolic version of that, right? where history gets re-examined and sort of goes through a little bit of a roller coaster event, bios and so forth. But this version of it really, mostly because of the musical, has been on another level altogether. Yes. I mean, this has been something that I don't think anybody, including Menelma Miranda, expected to resonate this deeply and this powerfully.

But, you know, one of the things that I think is important about this musical, I mean, one of the reasons it's so successful is just it's good, right? this is a high quality musical, right? There's a lot of great things about it. But when we think about what historical representations matter to people at different moments, right? You could put on a musical about, you know, the War of 1812. Would that resonate with people? It's only going to resonate with them if they somehow feel it's speaking to them

about some contemporary concern or something relating to them on that individual level. So Linman Miranda managed to tell a biographical story and a political story, but make it personal to people and make it feel relevant to them as they are grappling with issues that they look around and think about the world today. And that's why it became so popular, right? And for anyone living under Iraq, let's just go through a few of the facts. 11 Tonys, 16 nominations, Grammy, Pulitzer Prize, just broke all sorts of records, box office and so forth. Now, still touring, of course, will be for the next 50 years, touring around the U.S. U.S. and the world. 2.7 million households tuned in to watch it on Disney Plus. I mean,

that's huge numbers for television these days. But that's just like the tip of the iceberg. It just keeps going and going. The fascinating aspect of it to me and to anyone who sees it is the casting of it, the multicultural aspect of it. I think it's a brilliant idea right from the get-go of turning American history on its head and saying, let's look at it from a whole different angle and we'll do it through those practical means. Not to mention it's just damn good, as you say. It's just the songs just stick and the performances are amazing and continue to be in the new cast and so forth, but also the hip hop aspect of it too, right? Right. So when I first got interested in Hamilton, what captured me was at the time I was living in rural Ohio, about as far from the

Broadway bubble as you could get. And I'm walking down the street and there are these middle school kids singing Hamilton, right? Like they would now be singing Taylor Swift, right? And I thought, okay, this is really catching people in this powerful way. And then you can go on Instagram or Reddit and still, I think it probably can, and download instructions for kid Hamilton themed birthday parties. People were doing Hamilton-themed wedding vows. There was, you know, a rise in the number of people naming their kids, Jefferson and Hamilton. I mean, this was having a huge cultural impact beyond the kind of critical impact that we see with all the awards and everything else, right? And I think one of the things that we explore in the book historians on Hamilton is the question

about something you said, but you said it turns history on its head. And one of the issues is, is this turning history on its head, or is it telling a pretty traditional American origin story, but doing so in non-traditional ways? So it's telling that story through color conscious casting, right? This is not color blind casting. The rights require that you cast actors of color in the lead roles, Right. So he is insisting that there be Latino and African American and Asian actors in these core roles playing the white founding fathers and their girlfriends and wives and everything else. Right. So that's required by the book. And then he's telling the story in part through hip hop and rap music, right, and really highlighting the ways in which these musics that are associated with particular and particularly the African American community, right, are a powerful way to convey the energy of the founding. to convey the nation's story. So he's not telling a different story per se than we might find in the book you pick up at the airport, right? But what he's doing, he's giving that story and telling that story through means that suggest this is everybody's story. And in fact,

maybe African American and Latino cultural practices like are a window and insight, a way to convey what was going on and really capture what was going on in the founding of this country. I think it's a great history lesson, as a matter of fact. I've, you know, It's a really educational show for anybody who doesn't understand or know those basics, but it really does educate you as to the subtleties and the rivalries and all the rest of it that's going on between these men. It's really fun that way. But at the same time, it is obviously a conscious effort to make a statement about this nation and about the founding of this nation and how exclusive that story normally is told or was told before this. I mean, it really broke the mold and we'll never go back. again, which is really interesting. You know, it had that kind of impact. Yeah, it broke the mold. And I think there's been a lot of copycats.

I don't know how, you know, whether we're going to see anything that's quite as successful as Hamilton, in part just because of the quality of the show. And in part because it was so new, right? It was something that was doing something really different. So now we see 1776 being cast with an all-female cast. It doesn't feel cutting edge in the same way as Hamilton feels and has felt cutting edge. That is one of my takes on Hamilton, right? That it is really taking this origin story and making it more inclusive by giving

ownership of telling it to African-American Latinos, right, and really making their voices, sort of the narrators of the story and giving, you know, broadening the circle of who gets to tell the national story when we've long historically had in this country a link between full citizenship and whiteness and whether that's been a, you know, legislated link, right? You had to be a free white person to naturalize, whether that's been a symbolic, link, this sense of like only, you know, this is a white person's nation that you see coming out of white nationalist groups, right? It's really challenging that. But there is a debate here about this musical, which I think is really powerful one and that we talk about in the book,

different authors bring different perspectives, which is, while it is broadening in that way being more inclusive and who tells the story, it doesn't actually feature the stories of people of color. Because, you know, Le Marendman Miranda Leranda likes to say, this is America then told by America now. And the critique would be, you know, America then was multicultural and multiracial too, right? We have never been a nation that is, I mean, absolutely, this is a settler, colonial nation. We've never been a nation that's not been multiracial, right, as long as it's been a U.S. nation, right? And there are, you know, people of color who were there at the founding, who were fighting against slavery, who were fighting for independence, who were fighting with the

British, who were doing interesting, wonderful things. This isn't telling their story. And so one critique of this, and there's an essay in the book that makes this critique really powerfully, it's, you know, Seas Hamilton is not only not liberatory, but in fact, retrogressive, right, and that it's telling a traditional story that trumpets the deeds of Hamilton and Jefferson and, you know, Jefferson, not so much, he's not the good guy, but Washington, right? Through a cast of people of color that isn't in any way questioning deeply, right, that that celebratory, patriotic kind of origin story that we like to, you know, give kids in our schools, but that does not grapple fully with the extent of slavery, history of slavery and subtle or colonialism and all those in oppression,

and doesn't actually authentically tell the stories of people of color from the founding. Sure, I get it. That's a fair critique and an interesting one. But it maybe casts the net a little too wide. I mean, this is, after all, based on a biography, very, you know, certainly about the story of Alexander Hamilton. And so I just think that you walk into that store, maybe I'm showing my theater roots of my life where I just appreciate a really good idea, you know, fully executed. And that's what this guy has done. And the moment you're in the presence of these amazing performers who are from all sorts of walks of life and ethnic backgrounds, you are joyfully immersed in a new take. And it doesn't take a lot of thinking to get to the joy part because you're just enjoying yourself. Yeah.

No, and this representation, I mean, it is masterful. When you think about, I mean, Lin-Manuel Miranda Miranda is a huge student of the theater, right? He's deeply immersed in love's theater, right? So this has all the, it feels very new, but it has all these elements that make it familiar, right? It has the traditional I want song with my shot. It has a political story. It has a love story, right? It has motifs that come back again and again, right, and the build on each other.

It brings in, and one of the things I love about his work and I love about Hamilton is that people call it a hip-hop or rap musical something. time. But when you listen to the soundtrack, that's one element. There's also traditional Broadway ballads. There's also do-wops. There's also, I mean, he's got this really broad musical vocabulary, right? And so one of the things he manages to put in this, and I think this is partly a country for success. There's something for everybody here, right? Like, he's really great at creating representations that can speak to multiple audiences at different levels. And so doing that through music, this is speaking to, you know, grandparents and their grandkids, right? Because they're both finding something here that's like, oh, this music resonates with me, right? I remember my niece,

who is in later high school now. So when this came out in 2014-ish, 15, she was a very young girl. She immediately gravitated toward this, knew the songs immediately, like you say. But it was because there was such a strong female element to the show. You know, the women are extremely well-represented and fascinatingly, and they have the best songs, quite honestly. I mean, it's really just good for women. One of the essays in our book is by a high school teacher who talks about how he came in one day, you know, the homeroom and students could be playing music and students were requesting Hamilton. And he's like, okay, like this is a teaching moment. So he began developing using Hamilton as the basis for lessons. Like how do we build our study of early American history using this as a starting

point, right? And that's a way to really grab young people and then bring them along with like, let's deepen your understanding. So the women in the show, who I agree, are fabulous characters and played by, you know, the original cast, were just these extraordinary actresses, these beautiful voices. You can use that, like, representation. And then you can just, without too much trouble if you're teaching, like, go a little deeper. Like, let's use this as a starting point to talk about coverture.

Coverture was the whole system of laws that essentially made women second-class citizens in denied them full rights in early America, right, in colonial America and up until, right, through much of the 19th century. And that, we get a little bit of that, right? When we have René, Elise Goldberg, and Delica Schuyler singing about, you know, I'm going to get Thomas Jefferson to include women in the Declaration of Independence next time, right? You get one line there. That one line has so much history that you can unpack.

The power of a lyric. It's less is more, yeah. Yeah. And so what, you know, what Hamilton, I think, has been from an educator side really valuable is you can take, you know, students who are really caught by the music and say, now let's learn more deep in that understanding to take that lesson further and to really think about where would Angelico Schuyler? You know, like, who isn't very privileged person ultimately? But like, you know, what would her status have been in this society? Slavery is also an absent quality. You know, the discussion of that is absent from this.

There are those who suggested Alexander Hamilton came from that ethnic background in some way, sort of the Caribbean. But it's interesting that that was not explored at all. But, you know, you can only put so much in the musical. That's how I look at this. Yeah, I mean, I think like that sense that maybe Alexander Hamilton himself was of some mixed-race background is probably myth, right, that was a story that was manufactured by folks who wanted to discredit him at a time when that was something that would discredit you. I think the slavery story that this musical fails to tell, it has a little bit of slavery, but it really plays into what is our common national practice of seeing slavery is something in the South. and practiced by those, you know, like that. George, like, we don't really even get George Washington. Here it's Thomas Jefferson becomes the embodiment, right? And James Madison. But, you know, at the time when Hamilton was alive, 40% of households in New York owned enslaved people, right? Slavery was prevalent in what is presented here is the greatest city in the world. Alexander Hamilton himself may have, right, certainly the Skyler family had enslaved people. Alexander Sampleton himself may have also had enslaved people. And the show, you know, part of it is, the things you do to tell a story. But there's a line in one of the songs in my shout where they sing, we're a bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists. And like, those aren't like words that go together, right? I mean, that's just, that makes no historic sense. And he was not an

abolitionist. He was a member of the New York Manumission Society, which believed in gradual emancipation. But abolitionists were like, this is a moral issue and it needs to be done now, right? And he was basically against slavery because he was in favor of the United States becoming an industrial nation. And he saw slavery as a barrier to that, right? But he was not, he was not the spitfire abolitionist that this play would like to present him as. So it's one of the things that they don't get right. And I think it's a missed opportunity to think about the fact that the same newspapers that he's shown reading in this play would have ads from freedom seekers, right, who were escaping slavery in New York, their own. are seeking their return, right? So that, it really misses that part of history or simplifies that

part of America's past. Kind of that, like, to me, I mean, I love this musical, but I mean, it is worthy of critique, right? It is a representation that is worthy of both admiration and critique. Well, it wouldn't be as good as it is if it didn't stir some people up, you know, it was, that's the whole point of the thing, really. And that's what sort of, you know, the time when, when Broadway was really needing it, along comes this show that really stirred the waters, you know, and took some elements of what had been tried for years, you know, of how to cast differently, et cetera, et cetera, but never on the broad platform that this gave it. No, and one of the things that I think is when we look at, you know, many legacies of Hamilton,

but one of the just underreported maybe, this musical has created an enormous amount of job opportunities, an enormous number of job opportunities for actors of color, right? So, like, there's, last I checked, there were seven versions of Hamilton playing around the world. right, on a regular basis, right? There's the touring, there's one in London, there's one in New York. There's like, I mean, there's, so there was one in Chicago, right? There were, like, a lot of these cast, and there's a pretty big cast. And it's created really more opportunities and stable work for, you know, actors of color

who don't always find as many opportunities as they could on Broadway stages, right, or on, you know, other kinds of stages. So in the first iteration, right, he also shared profits with the original cast. And so it's been also about how do we change the folks who get to really make a living in this field. Right, exactly. The unforeseen consequences, the favorable ones. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It really is an Icarus story.

He's still a hero in so many ways, but he's really an icarus hero, isn't he? He's very flawed, right? I mean, and one of the things, but all these men, what humans aren't, right? And I think one of the things Hamilton is part of, And we talk about this. There's a whole genre of literature, right? The founding father genre of literature, sometimes called Founders Chic. But that literature, you know, it celebrates the greatness of the founding fathers, but it also recognizes they were humans with flaws, right? And I think one of the things that really attracted Linman Miranda to a figure like Hamilton was one, his roots in the Caribbean, even though he was not of Caribbean descent, right? But also his use of writing to make himself, right? The power of the word. his facility with that. That really drew Lin-Mama Miranda's attention, I think, this kind of story of him. But when you look at the founding fathers, I like talking about it's sort of stock values, right? Their stock values go up and down depending on the historical moment, right? With Hamilton

the musical, Hamilton was up, Jefferson was way down. And partly it's about what's going on in the world, right? So as we've had more understanding of recognition of reckoning with the history of enslavement, right? I mean, we've really had to reckon with the fact that the folks who were writing these glorious documents about human liberty were also enslavers, right? That is hard to grapple with. And Hamilton is a figure whose history on that issue is much more ambiguous, right, and much less sort of in your face contradictory, right? So he's easier to celebrate right now at this moment. Who really tells the story in Hamilton? I guess it's Burr, right?

I mean, and that's an interesting choice, especially because of Burr's obvious, fateful intersection with his life and death. Yes. One of the things that Linman Miranda does beautifully is he recognizes that storytelling is storytelling. And you have to, even if you're doing historical events, right, you need to construct them in a way that really has main characters, right? That has core universally understood themes and emotions, right?

So by pitting this as, you know, Burr versus Hamilton from the very beginning, making these two men who both have their own complications and flaws, right, and telling this story through their relationship with each other, it's a through line that grounds everything. And it makes it something that, you know, you can take that same basic storyline element and put it in lots of different situations, right? It doesn't have to be about America's founding. And I think he did that really, really well. I mean, he also, I mean, one of the things I really appreciate about the musical, there's things that, of course, did not happen, right? There was not rap battles about, should we assume, state debts, right? But by putting those debates in the form of a rap battle, you capture sort of the back and forth mudslinging that was, in fact, part of early American politics, right? So he's got a, like, yes, that's invented, but it's an invented truth, right? It's a larger, you're giving a larger sense of historic understanding, even though, obviously, they were not like wrapping out on the floor of Congress. No, exactly.

Like should they aid France? But you also understand how to, you know, look at this man critically. And, I mean, the Reynolds affair is for sure a low point of his life. And we really go there with the musical in a way that the biography can do, you know, can just explain it to you, but boy, the music takes you there. And that goes for everything, I suppose, the highs and lows of this whole thing. But it's a fascinating consideration of biographical, as you say, the triumphalism, the normal triumphalism of biography, founding father stuff, versus, you know, critically looking at

something in the possible negatives that come out of it. He does a good job of balancing it, I think. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, if this were just a, you know, Alexander Hamilton is a hero, like it wouldn't be very interesting. One of the issues I have with the musical is sort of like, you know, he comes out of nothing. He is not nearly as privileged to some of these, you know, folks who he encounters when he gets to the United States, obviously, right? But he is also, in the larger scheme of the world. He is not. a privileged person in the larger scheme of the world, right? But he's really building himself up. He's doing so through his sheer force of will. He's doing so in a way that is both successful,

but also abrasive. And it's like a Greek tragedy, right? He's his own source of his own downfall. And those are like storytelling that has deep roots in our culture and that people can really relate to these characters who are ambitious and then their own ambition like leads to their own fall. We're both involved in National History Day as a worthy organization in terms of, especially with the 250 coming, I think, consideration of Hamilton, the musical, make you think about that reconsideration of American history with this big semi-quincentennial coming. That's a great question. I mean, I think the United States, we have never really figured out how to tell our story in a way that is meaningfully inclusive and understanding and respectful of different perspectives. We typically tell ourselves stories that are more myths than full histories. And there's always, you know, the critique of telling full histories, histories that incorporate in the experiences and perspectives of the folks who built the nation of enslaved labor, of the stories of land appropriation and settler colonialism, is that we won't be able to build a positive civic identity or a positive sense of nationhood if we tell those stories.

To me, the sign of a mature country is one that is willing to recognize its history, reckon with its history, and figure out how to narrate that history in a way that allows its take responsibility for it, right? I see Hamilton's an important step, right? Hamilton is really doing, to me, symbolic work here. It's, you know, of saying, this nation's story is all of our stories. It is not just the story that one group gets to dictate and tell. And it's asking everybody to share, to broaden that circle of who's in the core group of American, right? But the next step would really be to now tell a more inclusive, not just who gets to tell the story, but to tell the story differently, right? To really tell the story and the way that we understand not just the things the founding fathers did to create this new nation, but all the people who were fighting for an expansion of freedom that included everybody, not just freedom for some, freedom for all, right? Thomas Jefferson was not fighting for freedom for all. He was fighting for freedom for a particular group. And I want this country to recognize there's always been people fighting for freedom for everybody. And those are folks we should be celebrating and building a positive identity

in recognizing that work. But the irony is that Hamilton wasn't one of them all the time. Oh, he wasn't. No, he wasn't one at all, right? No. I mean, yeah. So to tell this story through Hamilton, I mean, Hamilton, even more than Jefferson was, he's painted here as this like, I'm the man of the masses, but he was pretty elitist, right? He was very elitist. And he had a whole government plan for basically enabling the wealthy class to run the show. Indeed, and they kind of like an elected form of monarchy. So when they say in the play, right, oh, yeah, this idea for his own form of government, they don't tell you that his own form of government was really, really retrograde, if you're thinking about that. Thomas Jefferson, I hesitate to say that he was, you know, big for democracy,

because I don't think that's fair in the way we think about democracy now, but he was not for an elected monarchy form of government, right? So none of these founding fathers. I mean, let's be frank, in that more inclusive history, none of these founding fathers are doing that work, right? They're all fighting for freedom for a particular segment of the population. Exactly. But I think that's where we have matured too.

And I think the reassuring aspect of this is how wildly popular this show has been. And that is a statement unto itself that this kind of, country has reached a point where we can take an unusual reflection on ourselves and say, yeah, okay, I get it. You know, this is, we've changed, we are different, and it's requiring a different kind of expression of this story. Yeah, I mean, take a more critical look. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that, yeah, just I have to tell the story because it's my favorite Hamilton story, which is, I mean, so Hamilton comes out at 2015. It's very popular, right, and it's sort of reflecting in many ways the zeitgeist of the Obama era, right, and the hope of the Obama era. But in fact, Hamilton was

really, really popular across political lines at a time when our country is, as we know, really, really politically polarized. There are not many representations that have achieved popularity across political lines. So Barack Obama said it was the only thing he and Dick Cheney ever agreed on was Hamilton, right? And one of my favorite story about Hamilton is that after it premiered on Broadway in Utah, one of the most conservative members of the state legislature and one of the most progressive members of the state legislature, they dressed up as King George, and Alexander Hamilton to co-sponsor legislation, basically urging Utah teachers to use Hamilton in the classroom whenever it was appropriate to do so. Right. And to me, like that sort of like that there's

something here that is bringing folks who are more politically conservative and folks who are more politically liberal together is really, really interesting. And it gets back to the way in which Lynn Mountain Miranda is kind of a master code switcher. Right. So if you are on the right, what you might see in this story is this is a story of a self-made man who got no handouts and built himself up, right? If you're on the left, what you might see, this is a story that's about how immigrants have been really important to our story of national greatness, right? Both of those things, you can take both of those readings from this play, and they can both be inserted into particular political, you know, ideologies. Right. But we've had, like, we, whatever else we have, we need more

ways to bring people together across political divides in some fashion to have a conversation because otherwise we're in danger of falling apart as a country in really dangerous, dangerous ways. I totally agree. The beauty of this country is it's, you know, it's not a favorable term nowadays, but melting pot is what I grew up with. You know, that notion of a crucible through which everybody is coming together and becoming one is no longer the way to look at it. But it is the essence of the experience. And music has always been the way that this country has most effectively done that, in my opinion. Jesus, this is a divided country, but not when you're sitting in the audience at Hamilton, it's not that divided, because everybody's getting into it together. It isn't.

I mean, the other piece that's heartwarming, and you mentioned National History Day is when I think about what is the popularity of this play tell us, right? And I mean, when it tells us, it's this really good story, and it speaks to people, and it works on many levels and all of that stuff. But I think one of the things it tells us is that Americans are actually pretty drawn to history if they don't find it boring. So there's all these ways in which people want to be engaged in the past and they are historically curious and they, if we can do history and engage people in historical thinking in ways that are not somehow dry or, you know, just memorize this list of facts and dates, right? People are really interested, right? And one of the amazing things about this show that, you know, I find extraordinary is,

is it really catapulted this huge interest in Alexander Hamilton in history. So when I co-edded this book with Claire Bon Potter, a dear friend, she and I co-edited in this book, historians on Hamilton. And when I first talked to Claire and said, hey, Claire, we should do a book on Hamilton. And we agreed to do it. The first thing Claire did was go on Amazon to buy the federalist papers, say, hey, should we read these, right? They were sold out.

They were sold out on Amazon. Because so many people were buying the federalist papers. I'm like, what kind of representation gets people to go by the federalist papers? Like, how wonderful is that? That's funny. Ron Chernos book, like this 800-page book, like those sales went through the roof, right? There were, it's at one point seven or eight different museums that had Hamilton-themed exhibits because there was such like people will come, right?

Right, right. a Hamilton exhibit. So this representation also really ignited a passion for learning more about this period of history that I, you know, anything that can do that is, you know, like, wow, how great is that to get folks wanting to learn more? I'm going to do a shameless plug here. Renee and I are both on the board of directors of National History Day, which everyone should look at, nhd.org. It's a 50-year-old organization that's been encouraging kids to learn how to tell history through primary sources. It's really important. And I'm very proud. of being a part of it. A lot of people might take exception to the use of history as something that's so flexible as it is in the musical. Where do you come down on that as a historian? Well, I mean, I think it's important to ask when you see a historical presentation. What does it get right? What does it get wrong? But it's important to ask that question in a broad way as well. So, I mean, there's absolutely things that we've already talked about

that this show does not get right, right? It doesn't get slavery right. It is not telling a full story of the history of slavery. It does not get right that Alexander Hamilton was, you know, an elitist pretty narrow form of government, right? It doesn't get that story right. On the other hand, one of the things it's doing is really giving a kind of like history 101 lesson and how do we construct narratives of the past, right? So here we have in this show actual use of primary documents, right? So some like that you actually hear elements of the farewell address. But you You also get this recognition that who is telling the story matters, right? There's power in who gets to craft the interpretation. The whole way the show opens and ends is who tells your

story. And you get from him this sense that like there are things we will never know. Aaron Burr doesn't know what happened in the room where it happened, right? He was shut out of that room. He's not privy to that conversation. We don't know exactly what went down in that room, right? There's things in history that we just don't, you know, we're not going to be able to know. And my favorite is he really gets that, you know, constructing an archival record, which is what historians base their, you know, like the foundation for historical interpretation is what do we have left from the past? What are the traces from the past that we can use to tell a story about it now, right? He gets that people can, like, shape that, right? So there's a moment, the song, Byrne, where Eliza, who's been betrayed by Hamilton, his wife, he's cheated on her. And she says, I'm erasing myself from the narrative, let few people. future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart and she's holding her letters and she's setting them on fire. And I'm sitting there in the audience going, no, Eliza, no, right? Like, please don't burn your letters. But that kind of thinking about history, right? There's a lot

that we, people have destroyed historical sources because they don't want that story told, right? And that's historical thinking as much as it is sort of historical facts. And I think Hamilton is really powerful in giving us a window into historical thinking. She's a fabulous character, but I still, please don't bring your letters, right? Whoever you are if you're out there, don't burn your letters. I want to do an episode on letter writing. I really do because it's such a lost thing. It is a lost art, yes.

Professor Dr. Renee C. Romano teaches Museum Studies at Cooney City University of New York is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies at Oberlin. And on top of that, one of my fellow directors on the wonderful board of the National History Day. Look it up, NHD.org. Her book on this topic, co-edited with Claire Bond Potter, is Historians on Hamilton, how a blockbuster musical is restaging America's past. Thank you so much, Renee. It's nice to see you in this format.

I'll see you at the next board meeting. Thank you, Don. It's been such a pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to, powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded

when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.