The Issue on the Table: Is “Hamilton” Good For History?
In a new book, top historians discuss the musical’s educational value, historical accuracy and racial revisionism.
By Kate Keller
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Originally posted on Smithsonian Magazine
Even if it hadn’t won big at the 2016 Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical would remain a theatrical powerhouse and a fixture of contemporary American culture. It’s likewise been seen as a champion of U.S. history, inspiring Americans young and old to learn more about their founding fathers, particularly the “forgotten” Alexander Hamilton.
Professional historians are no exception to getting wrapped up in the excitement created by Hamilton, and they’ve begun to wonder what impact the show will have on history as an academic discipline. Though Miranda has said in interviews that he “felt an enormous responsibility to be as historically accurate as possible,” his artistic representation of Hamilton is necessarily a work of historical fiction, with moments of imprecision and dramatization. The wide reach of Miranda’s work begs the question of historians: is the inspirational benefit of this cultural phenomenon worth looking past its missteps?
Historians Renee Romano of Oberlin College and Claire Bond Potter of the New School in New York capture this debate in their new volume Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, a collection of 15 essays by scholars on the historical, artistic and educational impact of the musical. Romano, who hatched the idea for the book, says she was inspired by “the flurry of attention and conversation among historians engaging with [Hamilton], who really had very divergent opinions on the quality, the work it was doing, the importance of it, the messages it was sending.”
“There’s a really interesting conversation brewing here that would be great to bring to a larger public,” says Romano.
Hundreds of theater lovers in front of the Richard Rodgers Theatre in Times Square. Richard Levine / Alamy Stock Photo
While none of the book’s contributors question the magnitude of Hamilton as a cultural phenomenon, many challenge the notion that the show singlehandedly brought about the current early American history zeitgeist. In one essay, the City University of New York's David Waldstreicher and the University of Missouri's Jeffrey Pasley suggest that Hamilton is just one more installment in the recent trend of revisionist early American history that troubles modern historians. They argue that since the 1990s, “Founders Chic” has been in vogue, with biographers presenting a character-driven, nationalist and “relatable” history of the Founding Fathers that they criticize as overly complimentary. The “Founders Chic” genre, they say, came into its own in 2001 with the publication of John Adams by David McCullough, and Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, the latter of which they especially criticize for inflating the moral rectitude of their subject and “equating the founding characters with the U.S. nation-state.”
According to Potter, this increased focus on early American history stemmed from worries about current political turbulence. “By the 1990s, politics in the United States are actually kind of falling apart,” she says. “We have the culture wars, we have the shift of conservatives into the Republican Party. There is increasing populism in the Republican party and increasing centrism in the Democratic party. In other words, politics are really in flux.”
“One response to that is to say, ‘What is this country about?’ And to go back to the biographies of the founding fathers,” she explains.
Author William Hogeland similarly observes the current bipartisan popularity of the Founding Fathers, as intellectuals from the left and the right find reasons to claim Hamilton as their own. According to Hogeland, the intellectual Hamilton craze can be traced back to buzz in certain conservative-leaning political circles in the late ’90s, with various op-eds at the time lauding Hamilton’s financial politics as the gold standard of balanced conservatism. Hamilton’s modern popularity surged with the Ron Chernow biography that ultimately inspired Miranda, but Hogeland says that Chernow, and in turn Miranda, fictionalize Hamilton by overemphasizing his “progressive rectitude.”
Hogeland especially criticizes Chernow and Miranda’s depiction of Hamilton as a “manumission abolitionist,” or someone who favored the immediate, voluntary emancipation of all slaves. Though Hamilton did hold moderately progressive views toward slavery, it’s likely that he and his family did own household slaves – cognitive dissonance typical of the time that Chernow and Miranda downplay. He laments that the biography and show give “the false impression that Hamilton was special among the founding fathers in part because he was a staunch abolitionist,” continuing that “satisfaction and accessibility pose serious risks to historical realism.”
“As we’ve come more to want to save the founders from that story of the original sin of slavery, we put more emphasis on founding fathers who in some ways raised critique of slavery at the time,” adds Romano.