About Hamilton

In the early aughts (2002-2009), after my wife and I got married, my little brother and my little sister used to come and stay with us on breaks from school. Aspiring to be though not yet fully an educator, I put together a summer homework assignment for my brother in 2007, offering a $10 and a $20 bill as incentive (my sister had a geography assignment). He had to answer five questions, each one related to the two men on the face of each bill: Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson. I wanted him to know about America’s early history and appreciate it just as much as I did. He arrived that summer with the answers, in a letter I tucked away in a book called Alexander Hamilton: A Concise Biography, now in a home library that covers a multitude of other subjects. It just so happened, the summer I gave my brother that assignment was the same summer that Lin Manuel Miranda was sitting down to pen his soon-to-be-famous broadway musical.

In other words, Hamilton, the man, like so many of the other Founding figures, was already a character whose persona caught my attention as an undergraduate student of history. So it was no surprise to me, nor my wife, who heard me tell the tales and tragedies of Hamilton I was reading, that his name would soon form the title of a broadway stage production.

You see, I realize that “Hamilton,” as a musical, is a fad. I realize that some of you see “the musical” and roll your eyes at the bandwagon. And I get it. Fads can be obnoxious. Think silly string and fidget spinners. I feel the same way. It’s one of the reasons I wear my independent voting rights as a badge of pride… to avoid those obligatory, political fads. But the thing about this fad is that it’s more than a passing, passive experience. Hamilton, the musical, functions as a modern teacher, a three-hour lesson in our flawed and colorful history, drawing in young people the same way, though far better, that I attempted to do with my little brother more than a decade ago. The two girls sitting next to us this afternoon, both high school kids, were humming along to the music, even talking about how the play offered context to the words they didn’t fully understand without it. I think that’s fantastic.

Never have I seen a cast so diverse, so representative of America as it is, a musical so cognizant of its audience, of an America filled with people so eager to find their place, their legacy, of people so concerned with their own American story. It’s not an easy show to get into, that we all know, but don’t trash or downplay this particular fad as a protest of its cost or its popularity. For everyone who has had or will have the opportunity, Hamilton, the musical, is a mirror of everything we love and hate about ourselves, about our nation, about each other.

No, Hamilton was never the hero of the show. On the contrary, Hamilton was the avatar for every imperfect viewer who, like the Founders, dreams of and labors for a better, more perfect Union.