Hamilton!

A BSU History Club discussion

This week the summer cohort of our BSU History Club discussed the musical Hamilton. I had not seen the show until this week, and I had expected it was going to be a bit of a chore to watch. Instead, the 2 hours and 40 minutes flew by. I thought the historical inaccuracies (which I think can probably be partly attributed to the Chernow biography) were secondary and weren’t really central to my enjoying the show. The story-telling, which is different from historical accuracy, was brilliant. I was blown away by the scene where Angelica basically rewinds and shows us the same scene we’ve just watched, but from her perspective. And all that story-telling was done in the form of song. Crazy.

There is a legitimate argument to be made that by presenting their work in the form of historical narratives, historians are fictionalizing the past to a certain degree – if only in our choice of events, people, and perspectives from all the possible data available to us. Our focus betrays our interests, which to some extent must be based on our own lives and the cultures in which we are participants. If Lin Manuel Miranda is guilty of some degree of creative revisionism, so are we all.

In any case, here’s the 83-minute video of the History Club discussion. Thanks to John Ellis for suggesting the topic and providing the readings (articles from the Summer 2017 Journal of the Early Republic by Benjamin L. Carp and Nancy Isenberg), and thanks to Emily, Kate, Melissa, and Tom for participating.

Also available as a downloadable audio podcast at https://soundcloud.com/danallosso