The Broadway musical Hamilton has racked up some impressive accomplishments since its premier in 2015. It received a record-breaking sixteen Tony Award nominations, winning eleven, including Best Musical. A Pulitzer Prize for Drama followed shortly thereafter. The cast recording reached number two on the Billboard charts and won a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. A string of sell-outs at the Richard Rodgers Theater in New York City, meanwhile, was followed by sell-outs across the country when Hamilton went on tour.
Hamilton has also racked up some impressive accomplishments within the world of education. Beginning with 20,000 students from low-income families in New York City in 2015, over 32,000 in Chicago in 2019, and then an additional 250,000 students from across the country, the Broadway musical has had an impact in high school classrooms, teaching the American Revolution in a relevant and innovative way while invoking enthusiasm for learning in the students who have participated.
Composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda created Hamilton after reading Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. Sensing a “hip hop” nature to Hamilton’s life, Miranda not only merged that musical genre with traditional showtunes but R&B, pop, and soul as well, and then cast non-whites in the roles of the Founding Fathers to create a story of “America then, as told by America now.” It quickly evolved, however, in to something so much more.
“Hamilton is great for civics education, but that’s because this is not a didactic play,” Tim Bailey, education director the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History told The 74, a nonprofit news organization covering education, in 2018. “Lin has taken the biggest story, the founding epic, if you will, and made it compelling in a modern idiom of music and language and cultural reference, and even the physical bodies of the people dancing and playing these parts. He’s reimagined the whole thing.”
Although obviously now a believer, Bailey initially failed to grasp the educational value of Hamilton. “Our executive director came to me and said, ‘Do you think we can do something?’” he explained. “And I said, ‘A musical about Hamilton? Are you kidding? What kind of idea is that?’” After Ron Chernow, who served as historical consultant for the musical, gave Bailey tickets to an early off-Broadway production of Hamilton, he quickly came onboard. “I walked out and said, ‘Yeah, I think we can do something with this,’” he told The 74.
Bailey already had experience using music as an education tool, having crafted a curriculum called “Vietnam in Verse” that used songs from the 1960s to teach the Vietnam War. He scribbled an outline for a Hamilton curriculum and then met with Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller and Miranda’s father Luis Miranda, Jr. It wasn’t long afterwards that the Hamilton Education Program was launched by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, with funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute was founded in 1994 by Richard Gilder and Lew Lehrman to curb the tide of historical documents ending up in personal collections. The Institute has since amassed a library of over 70,000 documents, including a first draft of the U.S. Constitution and letters from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. These documents are now available digitally to schools and libraries across the United States as opposed to locked away as part of a private estate.
The documents also serve as the centerpiece of the Hamilton Education Program. Lin-Manuel Miranda relied on historical texts while crafting Hamilton, so it was a natural fit. The song “Farmer Refuted,” for instance, depicts a fictional meeting between Alexander Hamilton and British Loyalist Samuel Seabury – the ensuing debate is lifted from Seabury’s writings under the pen name A.W. Farmer and Hamilton’s response.
As part of the education program, students study Seabury’s “Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress” and Hamilton’s “A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress” to find correlating lyrics in Miranda’s song.
The Hamilton Education Program website also contains teacher guides filled with information on the era and other historical figures besides Alexander Hamilton, videos clips of five songs from the Broadway production, and online interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ron Chernow, and members of the cast.
Arguably the highlight of the program is when students use what they’ve learned – both about the American Revolution and how Lin-Manuel Miranda created Hamilton – to craft their own recital pieces. “We had two performances this morning of Abigail Adams by high school girls,” James Basker – president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute – told Variety when the Hamilton Education Program reached Los Angeles in 2017. “Abigail Adams is not in the show. They’re not responding to the show, they’re responding to their own discovery of her in documents. They give her voice on stage today, and it’s totally original.”
Although Benjamin Franklin and events like the Boston Tea Party and Continental Congress are popular among students, most gravitate to the lesser-known but more relatable characters from the period. Abigail Adams was thus a popular choice in other cities besides Los Angeles, as was Phillis Wheatley, a former African American slave turned poet who corresponded with George Washington. Another African American poet, Paul Cuffe, was highlighted in Chicago, while Madison Hemings – believed to be the son of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings – was spotlighted in New York City.
“The magical thing about Hamilton is that it has enabled us to reach kids from Title 1 schools, historically the most disadvantaged schools, and people who might not be interested or care about history at all.” James Basker explained to BookRiot. “This vehicle, because of the power of the music, lyrics, the whole spectacular show, and the program enables them to master segments of the material – using primary source documents of the founding fathers and putting them into their words, own songs, own poems, own dramatics pieces – taking ownership of the founding era for themselves and revoicing it.”
A promotional video for the Hamilton Education Program contains a brief segment where four high school students debate the impact of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “When does that happen?” Tim Bailey rhetorically asked The 74. “When do you catch high school kids between classes arguing about Thomas Paine? That’s just not reality. And yet it is.”
All because of a Broadway musical that defied convention, became a cultural phenomenon, and then extended its reach into high school classrooms. That likewise shouldn’t be reality, yet it is.
Anthony Letizia