On Tuesday morning, I presented the second of three lectures in my Osher class “Interpreting the Past.” The class is on historiography – what historians do and don’t do, why people misunderstand the job of a historian, and why historical theories (like Critical Race Theory) make people go crazy when they don’t understand that a historical theory is simply a hypothesis — a systematic set of suggestions and questions about the past. New theories ask new questions, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they evoke new answers. That process is benign. It’s called intellectual inquiry. But because too many people think that it’s dangerous even to ask the new question, they rant and rave at school board meetings and ban books like To Kill a Mockingbird and a biography about Roberto Clemente.
When I decided to teach this course, I knew that I needed to spice things up a little in order to keep the attention of the class members. Even the word — Historiography —sounds boring. People who take these classes are almost all retired, somewhere near my age, and accustomed to doing pretty much what they please with their time. That 40 of them (and more, because there was a waitlist for the class) chose to spend two hours in this class every Monday morning for three weeks is a real compliment. I know they have options. I want to honor their commitment by making a serious topic interesting and entertaining as well as informative.
When I was teaching high school, I also wanted to make my classes interesting and entertaining and informative. Surprisingly, I have found that people learn better when they are awake. In high school, teachers are bound by a prescribed curriculum and by time – entertainment often fell by the wayside. But in the Osher program, I prescribe the course content and I chose how much I want to teach in a given time. I have no reason not to include things that are interesting and entertaining.
Enter the smash Broadway musical Alexander Hamilton. I teach American history and government classes for Osher, and I have found ways to include snippets from this musical in several of my courses. Many of the songs in the musical are relevant to what I teach. I used two of them yesterday.
“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” the last song in the musical, is a touching lament about what Alexander Hamilton might have been able to do if his life had not been cut short in a senseless duel. His wife Eliza sings about what she did in the years after his death – she lived 50 more years – and how much she wished she could have shared these things with him. Jefferson, Madison, and Burr sing about how their political opposition to him did not mean they didn’t respect him. I used this in a discussion of sources. Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story? These questions are critical to the examination of history. We know about an individual’s life because of the records he left, but also because of the records of the people around him.
Here’s a link to a YouTube video of a cover recording of this song from Hamilton. It’s sung by an adorable group of young singers, and they’re fun to watch. The song itself takes about 3:30, but the rest of the clip shows the bloopers they made as they were struggling to get through this. It’s just fun. You should watch it.
So, who lived? Most of the top-tier founding fathers active in the formative years of the Republic lived to a ripe old age. Washington died at the age of 66 in 1799, but the others featured in this song – Jefferson, Madison, and Burr – lived a long time. Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83, Madison died in 1836 at the age of 85, and Burr died in 1836 at the age of 80. They lived long enough to tell their own story. Jefferson and Madison, along with John Adams (who died in 1826 at the age of 91), provide the best primary source evidence about what it was like to coexist in the political and social universe they shared with Hamilton. So the most obvious answer to the questions of “who lives, who dies, who tells your story” is that we have to turn to these storied figures of American history. What do they tell us about Hamilton?
Basically, they didn’t like him. In the correspondence we have between Jefferson and Adams as both were old men, they say a lot about the early years of the Republic, and they bad-mouth Hamilton whenever they mention him. The only sort of complete records we have about what went on at the Constitutional Convention are Madison’s notes about the events. Remember, this convention operated in secret, behind closed doors. At Madison’s request, his notes were published after his death. They were published posthumously, in the late 1830s. And guess what? Madison despised Hamilton also. His notes from the convention appear to downplay Hamilton’s role and emphasize his arrogance and general unlikeability (according to Madison).
Alexander Hamilton’s demotion to “second-tier Founding Father” is due largely to the fact that these were the primary sources relied on by later historians to construct the narrative of those years. Later historians downplayed Hamilton’s role (or portrayed him as a troublemaker) because the primary sources they used marginalized him. Although Hamilton’s wife Eliza was essentially the curator of her husband’s legacy, it was hard for her to compete for attention with the top-tier founding fathers. Biographer Ron Chernow took Elizabeth’s contributions seriously, and used them as the basis for a popular biography of Hamilton; this was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s inspiration for creating the musical.
I use this song to discuss the potential unreliability of sources that you may think are reliable. What better way to learn about Alexander Hamilton than to read accounts by his contemporaries? We extol the virtues of primary sources as the underpinning of reliable history, but historians understand that primary sources are only as good as the creators of the primary sources make them. Jefferson, Adams, and Madison were “unreliable narrators” in the primary sources they left behind. They did not report the totality of what happened, because they didn’t want to give Hamilton any credit.v
The second piece I use from the musical is the opening number ”Alexander Hamilton.” Sung by the ensemble, this piece introduces Hamilton’s life story and asks the question:
“How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore And a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot In the Caribbean by providence impoverished In squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”
Here’s a link to the cast performance at the White House (President Obama’s introduction lasts for the first 8:43 of this clip; it’s worth listening to because it acknowledges the role played by popular culture in informing the public about important ideas. The performance follows the introduction.)
The rest of the musical answers this question — and that was my point in using this video in this class. It served as a springboard to talk about the broader context of British colonization of the Americas. Americans tend to study American history through a rearview mirror – we look at the 13 colonies that joined in rebellion in 1775 and we examine their evolution through the period from first settlement to independence. We don’t pay attention to much else. But a full understanding of these events requires that we place these colonies in the context of wider British colonization throughout the hemisphere – including on the islands in the Caribbean. This includes Nevis, where Hamilton was born, and St. Croix, where he grew up. It also encompasses Bermuda (founded in 1612), St. Kitts (1623), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua and Montserrat (1632), Suriname (1650), Jamaica (seized from the Spanish in 1655), and the Bahamas (1649/1718).
These islands were an important part of the British empire in the colonial period. The British empire became wealthy because of the sugar grown on these islands. In particular, the British “sugar islands” enriched local plantation owners and British investors. Jamaica became Britain’s most valuable colony during the 18th century. It is not an exaggeration to say that the colony of South Carolina might most easily be seen as a colony, not of England, but of Barbados. More than half of the early settlers in Charleston came from the Caribbean, not directly from England.
The significance of this wider context for the history of colonial America may be a revelation for many of us, but it is not a new thought for the historians who study it. The College of William and Mary is the home of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, which since 1998 has supported and presented scholarship in the history of early America – but not just the Northern Hemisphere. Its umbrella project, “Vast Early America” studies and sponsors programs that address the connections among all of these colonies – the Spanish colonies in Central and South America, the French colonies in the Caribbean and in Canada, the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and South America, and the British colonies in the Caribbean and east coast of what became the United States. Their intent
is not to minimize the significance of the rise of the United States, but rather to place it in context, to understand how its development was impacted by what was going on all around them. The events in the Caribbean, Central Armerica, South America, and Canada all played a role in the economic, political, and social development that led to the 1776 revolution.
In an interview a few years ago, Karin Wulf (at that time the director of the Omohundro Institute) said the following in a 2019 interview:
Hamilton’s story is an early American story about the economy of Caribbean sugar and slavery and about the nexus of indigenous, African, English, French, Spanish, and other people across the huge expanse of early America from which he emerged. Yes, he was well read in political philosophy, and he went on to wield his skills to remarkable effect. And a well-developed, and still growing, political history of Anglo America will always be an essential part of American history. But it is only a part.
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and other political leaders of the early, eastern United States will continue to stride through the pages of our histories, but they will occupy that space as slaveholders as well as political leaders, and they will share that space with other people and places that will help us understand these founders better. A capacious approach to early America shows us a past that was infinitely complex, dynamic, globally connected, and violent. And it also still shows us—better shows us—the origins of an ambitious, powerful, and democratic nation. In short, we need an early American history, but one that fully grasps the depth, breadth, and complexity—the vastness—of early America. That is both good history and good civics.
https://blog.oieahc.wm.edu/vast-early-america-three-simple-words/
I will add to these comments — this approach not only shows us a past that was infinitely complex, dynamic, globally-connected, and violent. It shows us a past that is way more interesting.
In the same article, Wulf also noted that the “new American histories” offer a view into the “Atlantic World” – a term historians began to use in the 1990s to refer to the complexity of this place and time. National histories have their place, she says, but “national histories reflect artificial and retroactive borders of all kinds—economic, governmental, and social. A great strength of Atlantic history has been that it shows how often people and things moved across such boundaries.”
We’ve had fun in the two class sessions that have met so far. Next week I’ll be focusing on a time period – the end of the 19th century – that doesn’t have much connection to Alexander Hamilton. But I’ll find something else fun to watch.
Great piece. And that is why you are such a wonderful teacher!
I thoroughly enjoyed "Hamilton" thanks to the Disney channel and enjoyed your essay even more as a result. Thanks for sharing, Karen.