interesting essay at Vox: Hamilton and historiography

[heresluck]

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/27/9771784/hamilton-cabinet-battle-debt

Teaser:

The net impact of Miranda's rendition of the dispute is to render Hamilton as a more progressive-friendly figure and Jefferson as a more straightforwardly conservative one. Jefferson complains that Hamilton's text is too long, echoing Republican criticisms of Barack Obama's key legislative initiatives, and objects generically to taxes — again, sounding like a modern Republican — without raising the point that 18th-century taxes hit the poor more heavily than the rich.

This is part of a larger shift in the trajectory of how American history is understood. [...]

Miranda's Hamilton so perfectly matches the sensibilities of mainstream Obama-era Democrats that the Democratic National Committee turned an early November Hamilton performance into a fundraiser.

And it reflects an ongoing, albeit somewhat subtle, split among contemporary Democrats.

Comments

[isis]

I agree with your comment here! I really do like the complexity that both works don't shy away from - "in addition to being a nerd and a charmer he's also a drama queen, a workaholic, and an arrogant whiner with anger issues who cheats on his wife and exercises staggeringly bad judgment on a regular basis", hee, exactly!

I don't agree that the lines are clearly drawn as Hamilton=liberal and Jefferson=conservative in either Chernow's book (which I've just finished) or the musical. It's a lot more nuanced than that, even in the musical - yes, Jefferson's poking fun at "too many damn pages" echos modern politics, but so does everything in The Election of 1800 - I think LMM is not so much drawing lines as pointing out that the machinery of politics hasn't changed much in 200 years.

[jesse_the_k]

Just so. I can't name a single most thrilling part of the production, but the sense that the Founders were absolutely human, frangible, irrational is so welcome. The musical undies the transformation of our yeasty, strange, intermittent history into frozen wax figures.