History Musicals as Cultural Artifacts: The When and Why of Who Tells Your Story

Cristy Chory

Independent Scholar

In March 2024 Suffs began Broadway previews at the Music Box Theatre in New York City, opening to positive reviews a month later. Inspired by twentieth-century suffragist Doris Stevens’s first-hand account Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (1920), Shaina Taub’s musical explores the US suffragist movement, focusing on events leading to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed white American women the right to vote. Given the contemporary social and political US landscape, the timing of Suffs is conspicuous but unsurprising. The American musical theatre has a long-standing situationship with the history musical, a category of musicals that, according to musicologist Elissa Harbert, “dramatize real people and events of the past with the goal of both entertaining and educating the audience.”¹ Despite their comparatively low number, they exist on a fairly broad spectrum of historical credibility and fidelity to realism.

Focusing solely on the factual or aesthetic bona fides of such works, however, misses the larger lesson they provide. As the phenomenal, ongoing success of Hamilton (2015) demonstrates, history musicals continue to occupy the intersection of the popular and the political imaginations. Their greatest value, therefore, lies in their reflection of the cultural contexts in which they were created, particularly in connection with the time, place, or people they embrace as their subject matter.

In her 2018 article “Hamilton and History Musicals” musicologist Elissa Harbert establishes clear criteria for differentiating between history musicals, which deal explicitly and purposefully with the past, and period musicals, which are works of historical fiction. While period musicals, such as Dreamgirls (1981), Les Misérables (1985/87), Miss Saigon (1989/91), and Ragtime (1998) engage with and are inspired by the events and sociocultural look and feel of their respective eras, their central actions rely on invented narratives. By contrast, history musicals, such as The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960), Evita (1978/79), and Assassins (1990), take verifiably real people and events as their subjects. As Harbert explains, history musicals are crucially “promoted and received as telling a more or less true story.”² Accordingly, Titanic (1997)is more or less the true story of the sinking of the infamous ocean liner, and Fiorello! (1959)is more or less the true story of how the eponymous former mayor of New York City took on Tammany Hall.

In this essay I will focus only on history musicals staged in the United States (even if they originated elsewhere), limiting my scope to musicals that leverage bespoke, original compositions to convey plot and characterization. I consciously exclude from my analysis jukebox biopics, musicals that use a performer, musical group, or genre’s own catalog of songs to (re-)tell their real-life story. These include shows like Jersey Boys (2005), On Your Feet! (2015), and Ain’t Too Proud (2019)—a subcategory that merits its own separate analysis. Unlike jukebox biopics or period musicals, history musicals tend to be indebted to historical accuracy in ways these other related show categories are not. More importantly, history musicals, as a group, tend to adopt their own distinct strategies for engaging with, legitimating, and even challenging audience responses, the historical record, and cultural memory.

Let the Memory Live Again

History musicals challenge conventional understandings of audience engagement by walking the line between historical and theatrical empathy. In her 2016 article “Too Big for Broadway? The Limits of Historical and Theatrical Empathy in Parade and The Scottsboro Boys,” theatre historian Megan Stahl explores how audiences confront real instances of antisemitic and racial violence within the framework of musical theatre by unpacking the tension between these two kinds of empathy. Building on the work of scholars Raymond Knapp and David Krasner, Stahl positions theatrical empathy as the ability for audience members to “enter the world of the play both imaginatively and emotionally.” Crucial to Stahl’s argument is the individual agency of audience members. The very conventions that make musicals so accessible—“the inherent theatricality of spontaneous singing and dancing,” in combination with the aural and visual effects that accompany it—also allow spectators to choose the extent to which they engage with the content on an empathetic level: audiences can opt into or out of the complex web of sensory, affective, and kinesthetic responses that empathy entails based on their individual (and sometimes subconscious) comfort and affinity.³

Asking audiences to engage with the real, documented content of history musicals has the potential to destabilize this cozy dynamic. “[H]istorical empathy,” on the other hand, as Stahl explains “requires an intellectual involvement with the piece, a consideration of the particular people, places and circumstances within a broader framework.”⁴ Audiences’ knowledge, opinions, and innate biases concerning the events presented have a profound impact on the extent to which they—both as individuals and as a collective—might be willing and able to engage empathetically. Therefore, history musicals are both subject to and reflective of the systems and institutions that undergird the ways American constituencies remember and reinterpret history, both at the time they were first created and at the time of any subsequent production.

History musicals require audiences to navigate the complex relationship between fact and feeling, and as does every instance of cultural memory. Historian and classicist Martin T. Dinter explains that cultural memory speaks to why, how, and with what results certain pieces of information are remembered.⁵ Dinter glosses French philosopher of ideas Maurice Halbwachs’ 1950 La mémoire collective (The Collective Memory), explaining that for Halbwachs, history is just the facts—dates, names, events, quantifiable outcomes—while memory is the act, rooted in emotion, of reconstructing and reliving those moments, interactions, and experiences. In Dinter’s reading, individual memories become collective ones when they are intentionally constructed through social networks and attached to meaningful artifacts.⁶ Dinter continues his explanation of cultural memory by drawing on the work of Egyptologist Jan Assman to insist that cultural memories also derive from and are centered on myths “dictating the identity of a community … but also ‘transmitted’ by specialists” through those artifacts.⁷

American musical theatre, both as a product and an institution, meets these criteria, functioning as a generator, custodian, and transmitter of cultural memory. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Diana Taylor presents a framework for understanding how “performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity.” In many ways, Taylor’s important theorization of the archive and the repertoire parallel Halbwachs’s opposition between history and memory, distinguishing between the “supposedly enduring materials . . . resistant to change” and “so-called ephemeral . . . practice/knowledge.”⁸ Like Halbwachs’s concept of history, Taylor’s archive is more concrete, static, and composed of tangible artifacts that preserve historical information. This includes primary-source documents like government records, official photographs, and diaries, as well as librettos, scores, playbills, production stills, and cast recordings. By contrast, the repertoire is impermanent and dynamic, encompassing the knowledge, traditions, and beliefs communicated through embodied practices, including oral storytelling, culture-specific rites and rituals, and live theatre. Musical theatre has long served as both a meaningful artifact and avatar of American culture, identity, and values. This is true of history musicals, especially, since they straddle the curious line between archive and repertoire.⁹

That the example musicals in this paper (indeed the vast majority of history musicals) draw from and feed largely into the so-called Great (white) Man theory of history is no mere coincidence. Scholars and creatives including Suzan-Lori Parks, Caseen Gaines, Donatella Galella, Broderick D.V. Chow, Katori Hall, and Wind Dell Woods have illustrated the overwhelmingly complex and powerful ways that white-dominant culture has driven creation and consumption in American theatre. In the United States, racist white supremacist ideologies encourage, facilitate, and justify the advancement of white people over those of other races, operating with the belief that white people and culture are superior to all others—to say nothing of the belief in the superiority of men over women, non-binary, and trans people.

Well-meaning folks can recoil at the term white supremacy, preferring to believe that acts of racial or sexist bigotry, discrimination, or violence tend to be isolated incidents or outlier behaviors. But the insidiousness of white (male) supremacy is its invisibility, born of its ubiquity: its oppressive values are reinforced in everything from US jurisprudence to company dress codes and expectations for how people speak and interact in public spaces. The conflation of what is quantitatively “normative” with what is qualitatively “normal” tends to render white, patriarchal culture invisible to those who are brought up within it, regardless of whether or not it is reflective of their own individual identities. Rather than one possible way of existing among many, it is presented as the only correct way, rendering it above scrutiny, because it just is.¹⁰ In the words of poet and activist Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre, “white supremacy [and patriarchy] is not a shark; it’s the water” (insertion mine).¹¹ This is the water in which cultural memory and historical empathy in the United States are incubated and disseminated; these are the waters that infuse the form, content, and reception of history musicals.

Someone Tell the Story

Hamilton is not the first musical to attempt to tell, in the words of its creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, “a story of America then, told by America now.”¹² On their surface all history musicals represent this kind of engagement with cultural memory in their attempts to make aspects of a shared past accessible and relevant to the present. I propose, however, even more powerfully, that history musicals also tell a story of who we are now by selectively repackaging ideas of who we were then. The overlapping successful runs of two wildly different musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and 1776 (1969), clearly illuminate the differences between these two approaches.

Released first as a concept album in 1970, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar debuted on Broadway a year later. (Its film adaptation premiered in 1973.) As a story of us then told by us now, Webber and Rice deftly capitalized on the dominance of progressive rock in the cultural zeitgeist, with its deep orchestrations, classical influences, and complex storytelling. Everything from the score to the staging seemed to be insisting that if Jesus and His disciples had been doing their thing in the ’70s, they would have been doing it at a Pink Floyd concert. The strategy appeared to work. Jesus Christ Superstar was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1972, including Best Original Score, Best Scenic Design, Best Lighting Design, and Best Costume Design, and its cast performed a medley of songs on the awards ceremony’s live telecast.

Jesus Christ Superstar follows the biblical story of the final weeks in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, regarded by faithful Christians as true historical documentation. Thematically, the musical engages with celebrity, personal loyalty, and public accountability against the backdrop of a social movement upending the political and cultural status quo, and culminating in the concerted execution of that movement’s leader. A story of us now mediated by a specific then, the narrative arc undeniably parallels key American events of the late 1960s and early ’70s: various intersectional civil rights and countercultural movements and the US government’s increasingly militaristic response to them; deepening ideological, economic, and political divisions along lines of age, race, gender, and class; and the long cultural fallout from a number of high-profile assassinations. From this angle Jesus Christ Superstar is not really about Jesus at all; it is about the construct of American identity in a very specific historical and cultural moment, one in which long-held, deeply embedded cultural memories were being interrogated and outright challenged on an unprecedented, very public scale.

In that same moment, a very different musical, also featuring Great Men of history, was also running on Broadway: 1776 opened in March 1969 and ran concurrently alongside Jesus Christ Superstar for roughly four months. Composer-lyricist Sherman Edwards leveraged his us now—his pop sensibilities as a hit songwriter from the 1950s and ’60s—to tell the story of us then—America’s Founding Fathers (or, as Edwards put it, “to show [the Founding Fathers] at their outermost limits”).¹³ 1776 was a massive hit, both commercially and critically. It ran for 1,217 performances, spawned a two-year US tour and a West End transfer, won three Tony Awards (including Best Musical), and was adapted into a film in 1972.

Songwriter Sherman Edwards and book writer Peter Stone’s 1776 chronicles the dispute-filled days leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. According to Stone, he and Edwards explicitly avoided treating their protagonists “as gods or cardboard characters . . . . [1776] has this very affectionate familiarity; it wasn’t reverential.”¹⁴ The result was a show that presented the most recognizable, lionized men of US history just like the rest of us: they shared our lofty aspirations and our all-too-human shortcomings, even as they managed to accomplish one of the greatest political feats of Western civilization.

This escapist romp through the good old days, when enlightened white men engaged in heroic acts of cognition and compromise in order, essentially, to preserve the status quo, emerged out of the same countercultural milieu that produced Jesus Christ Superstar. In the era of the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts, a looming Equal Rights Amendment, and the Summer of Love, the overwhelmingly positive reception of a musical that repackaged trenchant matters of gender, race, and class as character-building moments for the literal embodiment of the white American patriarchy should come as no surprise. Just like the sociopolitical landscape of the 1960s, these particular men and this particular cultural memory could be pushed to their “outermost limits” and still emerge not only unscathed, but with a perceived mandate of dominance. Once again, the now was more fully revealed by the choice of then—not the other way around.

The Zeitgeist Where It Happened

Lin-Manuel Miranda has been very forthcoming about his inspirations and his intentions in writing Hamilton. Inspired by Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of the “unsung” founding father, Miranda hired Chernow as a historical advisor for the project, saying, “I want historians to take this seriously.”¹⁵ Elissa Harbert explains that this had the effect of elevating Hamilton’s authority in the public imagination, allowing the production to “take certain liberties without putting its reputation for historical accuracy in doubt.”¹⁶ By emphasizing the inclusion of the archive—historical evidence and primary sources in the book, score, and design—Hamilton, like many other history musicals, is insulated by the illusion of historical accuracy, even as it takes extensive license with plot, character, and style. To this, the (admittedly salty) historian Ken Owen asks: “How does a crony capitalist son of a whore, and a militarist pumped up by delusional aspirations of honor, grow up to be feted by liberal scholars?”¹⁷

Although many historians acknowledged and praised the ways Hamilton reignited public interest and imagination in America’s founding, they also pointed to the hip-hop musical’s complex relationship to historical fact. In particular, they flagged both its genesis and reception as evidence of the reemergence of founders chic, a term journalist Evan Thomas coined in 2001 to describe a very specific sensibility that emerged in reaction to the political, sociocultural, and economic turmoil of the early 1990s.¹⁸ An outgrowth of Great Man thinking, founders chic swooned over historical narratives that were character-driven, nationalistic, and relatable, often at the expense of historical accuracy.

The early ’90s were the era of Operation Desert Storm, the culture wars, rising populism, and an influx of religious conservatives into the Republican Party, paired with a shift toward centrism in the Democratic Party. All the while the nation was depending heavily on the private sector to lead the economic recovery from a global recession that had left millions of Americans unemployed. Any time the country is in flux, historian Claire Bond Potter offers, “one response . . . is to say, ‘What is this country about?’ And [to] go back to the biographies of the founding fathers.”¹⁹ Indeed, a tidal wave of Founding Father biographies appeared in the early 2000s—and I argue that the same impetus was largely responsible for the dual phenomenon of 1776 and Jesus Christ Superstar when they first appeared. Both musicals similarly premiered in a time of great cultural, political, and economic upheaval, exacerbated by the patriotic pressures imposed by the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of the country’s founding, in 1976.

This impulse is at least as old as the nation itself. In his 2018 essay “Who Tells Your Story? Hamilton as a People’s History” historian Joseph M. Adelman points to the now-pervasive myth of George Washington and the cherry tree as the invention of an itinerant evangelical book peddler-turned-biographer, Mason Locke Weems. According to Adelman, Weems was eager to capitalize on Washington’s recent death by memorializing him as a “larger-than-life saint who could serve as a moral model for nineteenth-century Americans.” The approach worked: not only did Weems’s biography see multiple print editions, but that one fabricated incident continues to significantly color the character of George Washington today.²⁰

In the case of the rapping Federalist, a similar phenomenon is afoot: Miranda’s founders chic approach promotes, in the words of historian Annette Gordon-Reed, “an idea of who we would like Hamilton to be,” rather than the full complexity of who he really was (italics added).²¹ Both instances demonstrate the power of myth-making in the social construction of cultural memory.

Who America wanted Hamilton the man and what America wanted Hamilton the musical to be were inarguably the products of the time and place of the musical’s conception. By the start of Barack Obama’s second term as President of the United States in 2012 the nation was recovering from the 2008 economic recession—but the myth of a “post-racial” America was rapidly falling apart. The time between Miranda’s first jottings and Hamilton’s Broadway premiere was a period of immense turmoil for race and immigration in American. Police murdered Black men and women in frightening succession, and hate-motivated gunmen wrought mass-casualty horrors in Charleston, South Carolina, and Orlando, Florida. At the same time, the Obama administration was cementing a complex legacy by both setting deportation records and implementing DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, by which immigrants without legal permission to remain in the United States brought into the country as children were temporarily allowed to stay). As political scientist Michael Tesler has observed, politics in this era became “more polarized by and over race.”²² At the same time, Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, deftly leveraged both his positionality and his genuine love of music and pop culture to defuse identity politics and, seemingly, to nudge forward national conversations about equity, inclusion, and justice.

To this latter point, a host of scholars, critics, and artists have affirmed Hamilton’s advocacy for BIPOC and immigrant communities. Leslie Odom Jr., who originated the role of Aaron Burr, explained it this way: “It is quite literally taking the history that someone has tried to exclude us [BIPOC Americans] from and reclaiming it. . . . We are saying we have the right to tell it too.”²³ This sentiment evidently reverberated with the thousands of racially and ethnically diverse New York City public school students who saw the musical in a partnership between the municipal government and the production.²⁴ Even the ongoing ubiquity of Hamilton-themed Halloween costumes years after the show’s premiere affirms its impact, with multiple generations of intersectionally diverse constituencies admiring and even emulating Black and Brown people in positions of cultural and political authority. It is important, however, to acknowledge here the gross irony of Black, Brown, and other intersectionally marginalized performers embodying agents of mass enslavement and genocide. Theatre scholar Patricia Herrerra recounted such an instance, when—after having fallen in love with Hamilton for its personally affecting message of inclusion and empowerment—she had a moment of reckoning when her daughter asked to dress as Angelica Schuyler, an enslaver, for Halloween.²⁵

Herrerra is not the only scholar or critic to highlight Hamilton’s particular friction between intent and impact. Sarah Whitfield acknowledges it in her introduction to Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity (2019), positioning the essays that follow (by various authors) as critical interrogations of the myriad ways in which musical theatre is tied to structural and institutional constructs of race and privilege. In particular, Whitfield points to the “Cool White Guy narrative,” in which “benevolent white men get to extend their spaces and be heroes for doing so, where it is white men who get to do almost all the cool, important, revolutionary stuff.” Again, there is a deep irony baked into this formula, since American musical theatre came to exist in its present form thanks in large part to “Black performance practice and the work of African American performers, creatives, and collaborators racialized as Black.”²⁶ Musicals have tended to privilege whiteness; consequently, whiteness has tended to pervade delivery and reception of the form.

This necessarily applies to the content of musicals, as well, especially history musicals, given their precarious dual identity as both archive and repertoire. Hamilton’s casting, style, and genre-blending ultimately yield dramaturgical and historiographical vagueness upon which audiences can map themselves based on personal affinities and experiences. This vagueness allows for a spectrum of audience responses: based on their positionality, willingness, and knowledge of the historical people and events presented onstage, individual audience members watching Hamilton will necessarily experience historical empathy to vastly different degrees, some not at all.

On the other hand, history musicals like Parade (1998) and The Scottsboro Boys (2010) disrupt the mechanisms that engender both historical and theatrical empathy by leveraging form, genre, and design expressly to deny audiences an out in confronting the ugly truths of American history—lynching and minstrelsy, in these two examples.²⁷ Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (2016) disrupts these mechanisms in other ways. Recounting the more or less true story of the meteoric success and subsequent erasure of one of the earliest successful Broadway musicals to feature an all-Black creative team and cast, Shuffle Along . . . and All That Followed confronts its audiences with the embodied existence and creative excellence of Black artists on Broadway, both in the 1920s and in the present of the performance itself. Rather than representing acts of physical violence, the musical shows how the Black figures at the center of the very event that Langston Hughes credited with igniting the Harlem Renaissance were systematically and systemically written out of American cultural history.

Shuffle Along . . . and All That Followed opened and closed just over a year after Hamilton had opened on Broadway, running for 38 previews and 100 performances. By contrast, as of March 2025, Hamilton has played more than 3,300 performances at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, on top of its initial, twice-extended Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater. What explains this difference? Miranda and his collaborators task bodies and art forms that are Black or Black-coded with telling a story that centers real-life white, mostly male historical figures.²⁸ In doing so, Hamilton manages to avoid potential roadblocks to audience buy-in—even as it sometimes aggressively pushes boundaries of form, genre, and craft—by allowing its (predominantly white) audiences to engage with its uncomfortable history only to the extent that they might be willing.

Looking Backward to Move Forward

In the decade since Hamilton debuted Off-Broadway, history’s march has not ceased. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, COVID-19, strategic dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, Dobbs v. Jackson, and a second Trump administration have all shaken, if not distorted outright, the cultural, economic, and political landscapes of the United States. Necessarily, then, Hamilton’s celebrated legacy of inclusion, accessibility, and empowerment lands differently now, inviting us to ask: Is this a musical that convincingly casts marginalized people as central to American identity, all the while activating a history lesson via anachronistic nods to contemporary music and culture? Or is it one that glorifies critically flawed men in, as historian Joanne Freeman describes, “an ode to a somewhat nebulous American exceptionalism” stemming from “America’s current identity crisis,” in the twilight of the Obama era?²⁹

Perhaps Hamilton is merely a powerful example of how to navigate Freeman’s “identity crisis” in, as Harbert claims, “a space where the past and the present can dance together.”³⁰ Or maybe it’s a cautionary tale, urging us, as theatre scholar Donatella Galella describes, not to allow pacifying signifiers of “hard work, extraordinariness, and patriotism” to divert our attention from the ways in which fundamental flaws in our nation’s founding carry over into the present day.³¹ If so much has shifted in a decade, what might future audiences and scholars have to say about Hamilton in another ten years? In fifty?

One of the primary challenges in assessing history musicals’ reception over time is that history musicals simply do not tend to run long enough to track it. True, some—including The King and I (1951), The Sound of Music (1959), Funny Girl (1964), 1776 (1969), Evita (1978/9), and Come from Away (2017)—have enjoyed 1,200- to 1,500-performance runs, lasting three to four years on Broadway, but no history musical has weathered the longer-term social and cultural shifting that Hamilton has. Only Six, the pop musical about the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII that opened on Broadway in October 2021, comes close—but even that is no guarantee of enduring popularity. Therefore, revivals of history musicals may prove more immediately useful in understanding the longer arc of their relationship to time, culture, and memory. Here, the work of Bryan Vandevender and Bruce Kirle provides a strong foundation for assessing further the ways that history musicals reflect, shape, transmit, and validate the cultural memory and cultural values—of both whenthese musicals created and when they have been revived. After all, each new revival is another opportunity to interrogate the now by way of the then.

Hamilton concludes with the interrogative refrain, “Who tells your story?” Implicitly, it also asks, When? Why? Viewing history musicals as a reflection of the time they were written in and not about allows us to, in the words of Shakespeare scholar Phyllis Rackin, “meditate on the process of historical representation rather than attempting to beguile them into an uncritical acceptance of the represented action as a true mimesis of past events.”³² As American theatre scholars and artists look forward to the ongoing challenges and unprecedented opportunities of remaking their art into an anti-racist, intersectionally inclusive cultural arena where empathy and imagination reign, the question of whose stories we tell—and when, and why—continue to loom large.

1
Elissa Harbert, “Hamilton and History Musicals,” American Music 36, no. 4 (2018): 413. ↩︎
2
Harbert, 421. ↩︎
3
Stahl, “Too Big for Broadway?: The Limits of Historical and Theatrical Empathy in Parade and The Scottsboro Boys,” Studies in Musical Theatre 10, no. 1 (2016): 70. See also Elisa Magrì and Dermot Moran (eds.), introduction to Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood: Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2017), 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71096-9. ↩︎
4
Stahl, 70. ↩︎
5
Martin T. Dinter, “Introduction: What is Cultural Memory?” in Cultural Memory in Republican and Augustan Rome, eds. Dinter and Charles Guerin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 9. ↩︎
6
Dinter, 2. ↩︎
7
Assman in Dinter, 2. ↩︎
8
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2-3, 19, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385318-001. ↩︎
9
Thanks to Bess Rowen for pointing me toward this important connection. ↩︎
10
Contrast this with the perspective of anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis: “[T]he world in which you were born is just one model of reality. . . . [O]ther cultures aren’t failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” Quoted in Juniper Glass, “Tales of the Ethnosphere,” Utne Reader, March 1, 2004, https://www.utne.com/community/tales-of-the-ethnosphere. ↩︎
11
Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre, “How to Explain White Supremacy to a White Supremacist,” Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough (blog), March 17, 2016, https://guante.info/2016/03/17/how-to-explain-white-supremacy-to-a-white-supremacist-new-video. ↩︎
12
Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,” Atlantic, September 29, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton/408019. ↩︎
13
Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon, Broadway: The American Musical, 1st ed. (New York: Bullfinch Press, 2004), 328. ↩︎
14
Kantor and Maslon, 328. ↩︎
15
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central), 2016, 32. ↩︎
16
Harbert, 419. ↩︎
17
Ken Owen, “Historians and Hamilton: Founders Chic and the Cult of Personality,” The Junto (blog), April 21, 2016, https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/04/21/historians-and-hamilton-founders-chic-and-the-cult-of-personality. ↩︎
18
Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Roberston, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1. ↩︎
19
Quoted in Kate Keller, “The Issue on the Table: Is ‘Hamilton’ Good for History?,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 30, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/issue-table-hamilton-good-history-180969192. ↩︎
20
Joseph M. Adelman, “Who Tells Your Story? Hamilton as a People’s History” in Historians and Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 151. ↩︎
21
Quoted in Jennifer Schuessler, “‘Hamilton’ and History: Are They in Sync?,” New York Times, April 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/theater/hamilton-and-history-are-they-in-sync.html. ↩︎
22
Michael Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5, italics removed; cited in Elizabeth Titrington Craft, “Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton,” American Music 36, no. 4 (2018): 429–30, https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0429. ↩︎
23
Quoted in Mark Binelli, “‘Hamilton’ Mania! Backstage at the Cultural Event of our Time,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/hamilton-mania-backstage-at-the-cultural-event-of-our-time-44203/3. ↩︎
24
Michael Paulson, “Students Will Get Tickets to ‘Hamilton,’ with its Hip-Hop-Infused History,” New York Times, October 27, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/theater/students-will-get-tickets-to-hamilton-with-its-hip-hop-infused-history.html; cited in Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 379, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557418000303. ↩︎
25
Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton” in Historians and Hamilton, 261. ↩︎
26
Sarah Whitfield (ed.), introduction to Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity (London: Red Globe Press, 2019), xiv, xv. ↩︎
27
Stahl, 70. ↩︎
28
In this light 1776 is arguably more progressive than Hamilton, insofar as the former features an entire song about the morality and politics of the transatlantic slave trade. Its “Molasses to Rum” leaves room for no ambiguity: chattel slavery is evil; both the American North and the South are complicit; and those who decry it are hypocrites, for they benefit economically, too, from the morally bankrupt system. This serves in notable contrast to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them mentions of enslavement in Hamilton, which Lin-Manuel Miranda has conceded he struggled to write. (Thanks to Donatella Galella for inspiring this line of thought.) ↩︎
29
Joanne B. Freeman, “Will the Real Alexander Hamilton Please Stand Up?,” Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 257; quoted in Harbert, 419. ↩︎
30
Harbert, 426. ↩︎
31
Galella, 3. ↩︎
32
Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 29; quoted in Harbert, 417. ↩︎