"“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”:
Abstract
With its recent addition to the streaming service Disney+, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 Broadway production Hamilton: An American Musical has once again entered cultural discourse. While lauded for its appraisal of Alexander Hamilton’s life as an immigrant’s story and as a revisualization and presumed reclamation of America’s past through the lens of an almost exclusively nonwhite cast and group of creators, the musical has also been subject to criticism. Early critics aptly categorized it as another component of Founders Chic and questioned its presumed progressive stance on history-writing in the face of its veneration of the Founding Fathers. The following paper aims to discern the musical’s awareness of its position within history through the analysis of relevant lyrics and rhetorical devices. Hamilton is thus presented as a piece of history-writing aware of the process of historical reenvisioning, carefully and individually established through its respective generational, political, and sociological ideals and identity.