caitri | A Book a Day: Hamilton

Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like, and today is a gimme. One of my weaknesses is that I've honestly never found history after 1800 to be that interesting, and I struggled with that in Chernow's book too. (Admittedly there's only four years after 1800 here, but they are all politically and personally loaded and so it's a chonk of text.) The most interesting thing about the book to me is how you can see exactly which bits of it, even which turns of phrase, were utilized in Miranda's musical. At one point I wanted to write an essay on Hamilton as a transformative work, because what he is very much doing is racebending a specific text as a specific response. Chernow goes into the history of racial attacks on Hamilton (eg. "Creole bastard") before concluding that he thinks Hamilton is white and that it doesn't even matter anyway. I think I read something, maybe in the Hamilton: A Revolution book, where he recanted that though. Anyway, have fun streaming, y'all!