2025.09.11
I found the book "Hamilton: The Revolution" (helps to have a big iPad; it was readable on my iPad mini, though, but the Mac Kindle client shows each page as a tiny thumbnail?) It was exactly what I was hoping for - some making of, the text itself, footnotes and references, some chat about where small liberties were taken from the historical record.
Man, such an amazing musical. You can really see the connection to Shakespeare when you read it on the page - especially when one character steps on another's line to finish the meter of the line.
The coolest find in the book was a deleted third Jefferson/Hamilton "rap battle" about whether to act on the Quakers attempt to end slavery in the USA. You can see the lyrics at Genius or hear a rough demo on youtube
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
November. It's a way of affirming the very American view that Benjamin Franklin offered in 1786, when someone asked him how the new Union was getting along: "We are, I think, in the right road of improvement, for we are making experiments."
WASHINGTON: If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I'm gone. Like the Scripture says: "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree And no one shall make them afraid." They'll be safe in the nation we've made. I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree. A moment alone in the shade. At home in this nation we've made. One last time.
"My view is that Hamiltonians existed until Teddy Roosevelt," says Brooks. "Hamilton used limited but energetic government to create mobility, but after Roosevelt, the debate became big government versus small government, so the Hamilton tradition got caught cross-ways." Neither party has room for him now, [David] Brooks believes. Republicans have become allergic to government, and can't see what Hamilton saw: that government can let more people into the system, and help capitalism solve the structural problems it is facing. But Democrats balk at embracing somebody whose programs would create more opportunity for gifted upstarts at the expense of creating more misery for the people who can't excel.
Alexander Hamilton [...] spent his life defending one idea above all: "the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country."