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

[brainwane]

Oooooh! Thank you so much for the link. I literally thought yesterday that I'd like to see political scientists' opinions on the Hamilton rendering of those disputes! And on a different axis, I see Hamilton as following a new trend of silly, earthy, exuberant, sentimental, loving, infernokrusher and literally fantastic retellings of our history.

[rosefox]

It's so interesting to me that people are treating Hamilton (and Chernow's biography) as wholly complimentary and flattering to Hamilton and his ideas, when it's pretty clearly an attempt to complicate our views of them.

[grammarwoman]

That's a fascinating article - thanks for posting it!