2 - “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement

Summary

Broadway's Hamilton: An American Musical has resonated with the contem- porary, popular audience in a way that few texts, let alone musicals, do, and not least because of its use of historiography. In addition to re-presenting America's revolutionary history as America's political revolutions today with its theses on race and public action, the musical embeds quotes from real his- torical texts, such as Hamilton's letters and political pamphlets, into the text of the musical itself. One of the main themes of the show is that of histori- ography and the problems of documentation; author Lin-Manuel Miranda has said more than once that the characterizations of his version of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, Aaron Burr, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were drawn directly from their bodies of writings rather than just Ron Chernow's best-selling biography Hamilton. While the men's writings still exist—Hamilton's in great number, Burr's less so—the conspicuous absence of the women's writing in real documents and in the musical demonstrates one of the many problems of writing history. At the same time, teaching with special collections and rare books, whether as a librarian or an academic in another field, likewise demonstrates the challenges of historical narrative, both through its creation and its adoption (or deletion). The popularity of Hamilton and the show's transformation of an academic text into a popu- lar expression of America's national conversations on race, class, and politics demonstrate the ability of a cultural production to engage minds, hearts, and imaginations.

In the same way, special collections libraries and archives have the ability to transcend their origins as closed and forbidding institutions to achieve new and broader levels of access. Further, the development of the great libraries as an ancillary to the academic revolutions of the eighteenth century is echoed in our contemporary problems with engagement. Many library administra- tions see rare books and special collections as fussy and outdated remnants of a dated system rather than living repositories that can be built upon and used to engage with students and patrons. A number of academics also reject “old book history” and its reliance on documentary and archival evidence in favor of abstract and popular literary theory, preferring not to engage with mate- rial objects.