![]() It’s the story of Tupac or Big.”įor the uninitiated (that is, me): Tupac Shakur and Christopher George Latore Wallace (aka the Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls, or Biggie) were two of the most famous rappers of all time. As Tommy Kail, Hamilton’s director, explains: “In Alexander Hamilton, you have someone born into very difficult circumstances – profound poverty, no parents, no support – who used words to elevate himself out of those circumstances, and then died violently because of those words. That’s a classic hip-hop story.” Tommy Kail, Hamilton’s directorīut Miranda was adamant. “In Alexander Hamilton, you have someone born into very difficult circumstances who used words to elevate himself out of those circumstances, and then died violently because of those words. What gripped him was the idea that Hamilton, a man who wore silk stockings, fought with flintlock muskets, and died more than 200 years ago, seemed exactly like a modern-day hip-hop star.įrom the outside, this sounds – despite the wild success of Hamilton on two continents (and perhaps about to be three, with its arrival in Australia next year) – completely ridiculous. Nor was Miranda thinking that Hamilton’s story was tailor-made for a musical – even though he had just won four Tonys for his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, a paeon to his Hispanic-American roots. Not that Hamilton reminded him of himself (Miranda, like Hamilton, is academically gifted, gregarious, uxorious, and has worked tirelessly for years to reach the top of a tiny elite in his field, despite starting out as an unlikely outsider). Lying in his hammock in Mexico, Lin-Manuel Miranda was electrified by Hamilton’s story, and became obsessed with a single thought. On a rocky beach in New Jersey, Burr shot him in the stomach, and the following day Hamilton – not yet 50 – died from the wound. One final fact: on July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton fought a duel with the then US vice-president, Aaron Burr, after a dinner party conversation went awry. He founded the US Mint, the National Coast Guard, the New York Post newspaper (which still exists today), and co-founded the New York Manumission Society, an anti-slavery organisation instrumental in ending the international slave trade. He not only founded the first US central bank (the direct forerunner of the Federal Reserve), but also created the first five securities ever traded on Wall Street. He was appointed the first US Treasury secretary, and created large swathes of the US federal government from scratch: the first budget systems, the first tax systems, the customs service, the first monetary policy. ![]() He wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, the seminal essays that ratified that Constitution.Īlexander Hamilton was instrumental in the writing of the US Constitution. He was one of the chief instigators, signatories and defenders of the American Constitution. In New York, Hamilton became George Washington’s closest aide during the revolutionary war, a military hero, and compressed three years of legal study into nine months (he would become known as the most eloquent advocate at the New York bar). Penniless and orphaned, he was nevertheless so superlatively bright that, after his “wondrous” description of a hurricane was published in a local newspaper, the wealthy residents of his town clubbed together to send him to the US for an education. He was abandoned by his father at 10 and lost his mother at 12. He was born illegitimate, then an almost insurmountable social disgrace, in or around 1755 in the Caribbean. ![]() This tells you something about Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is short and intense and intellectually competitive (no Dan Brown for him) and it also tells you something about Alexander Hamilton, whose life was not the stuff of the average academic doorstopper.Īlexander Hamilton is crucial to the history of the United States of America, yet, despite appearing on the $US10 note, he is (or was, before his eponymous musical) often described as “the forgotten Founding Father”. For some light holiday reading, he took along a 700-page historical biography called Alexander Hamilton. In the American summer of 2008, seven years before the Broadway premiere of his musical juggernaut Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda went to Mexico. ![]() Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
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