The Ten-Dollar Founding Father Without a Father: Teaching and Learning With ‘Hamilton’

By Katherine Schulten, Sarah Gross and Michael Gonchar
Lesson Plans - The Learning NetworkLesson Plans - The Learning Network
American History

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

Yes, it really is that good.

That’s how Ben Brantley began his August 2015 review of “Hamilton” on Broadway — a rave about a show that “makes us feel the unstoppable, urgent rhythm of a nation being born.”

But you don’t just have to take The Times’s word for it. “Hamilton,” for which tickets are nearly impossible to get, won a Grammy and numerous Drama Desk awards; the MacArthur Foundation gave Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, a “genius” grant; and Michelle Obama recently called it the “best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life.”

Even if they haven’t been to the show itself, teachers all over are using the original cast recording in their classrooms to breathe new life into United States history.

This spring, the Rockefeller Foundation and the show’s producers are financing a program to bring 20,000 New York City 11th graders, all from schools with high percentages of students from low-income families, to see “Hamilton” at a series of matinees. As part of the program, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History will develop curriculum.

Below, our contribution to what we expect will become a deluge of material: some ways to teach and learn with “Hamilton,” via articles, Op-Eds, reviews, archival materials and multimedia from The New York Times.

How will you teach with this “revolutionary musical about taking your shot, speaking your mind and turning the world upside down”? Let us know.

“Alexander Hamilton,” the opening number, performed at the 2016 Grammy Awards.

Overview: “A Story About America Then, Told by America Now”

In a July 2015 T Magazine piece, “The American Revolutionary,” Jody Rosen explains the show’s origins:

The genesis of ‘‘Hamilton’’ has already entered theatrical lore. While on vacation in Mexico in 2008, Miranda cracked Ron Chernow’s doorstop biography, ‘‘Alexander Hamilton,’’ which was nominated in 2004 for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the George Washington Book Prize. A few dozen pages in, Miranda’s new project began leaping to life. In Hamilton, he saw a figure he recognized: a word-drunk firebrand with untrammeled ambition, raw talent, an outsize ego and a lust for combat, verbal and otherwise. Miranda saw a rapper.

Mr. Miranda first performed “Alexander Hamilton,” the song that would go on to open the musical, at the White House in 2009.

Sung by Aaron Burr, the song begins:

How does a bastard
Orphan
Son of a whore and
A Scotsman
Dropped in
The middle of a forgotten
Spot in
The Caribbean by Providence
Impoverished
In squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Ms. Rosen writes:

The question is a good one. How exactly did Hamilton rise from the deprivations of his childhood in the island backwater of St. Croix to become a storied founding father: an aide-de-camp of Gen. George Washington, the prime mover in the creation of the United States financial system, the first secretary of the Treasury, the author of nearly half of the Federalist Papers, the subject of America’s first political sex scandal, the bane and bugbear of everyone from Burr to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? But it is the manner in which ‘‘Hamilton’’ poses this question — in the emphatic cadences of rap, with witty rhymes pouring out over a tolling beat — that has been electrifying audiences since January, when the show debuted Off Broadway at New York’s Public Theater.

Mr. Miranda says that “Hamilton” is “a story about America then, told by America now.” The “beef” Hamilton and Jefferson had then are debates we’re still having today. How many connections to our world can your students make as they read, watch and listen?

Below, a few ideas to help.

Ideas for History, Civics and Social Studies Teachers:

Getting to Know the Characters

Ron Chernow, who wrote the biography that inspired “Hamilton,” discusses the similarities between Washington and Hamilton.

“Hamilton” takes the dull, virtuous characters students know from history textbooks and reveals them to be complex, contradictory flesh-and-blood human beings.

Because of the show, interest in all aspects of Alexander Hamilton’s life has exploded. According to this article, visits to his house at the Grange National Memorial in Harlem were up by 70 percent in 2015, and fans of all ages have been visiting his grave and leaving mementos. “Hamilton” references are even beginning to showing up in pop culture from Peeps dioramas to “Hamilton”-themed SoulCycle rides.

But historically, Hamilton has often been less celebrated than other founders. Back in 1998, Michael Lind, a Hamilton biographer, argued in an Op-Ed that Hamilton should be as acclaimed the other founding fathers and suggested a Hamilton memorial on the Mall in Washington. Just as Mr. Chernow and and Mr. Miranda do, he points out:

Hamilton was not only the most brilliant of the Founders, but also the most flamboyant. An orphan raised in the West Indies, he was the only self-made man in a galaxy of patricians. His adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds produced the first great sex scandal in American politics.

Invite your students to choose one of the characters from the show and learn more about him or her to tell a more interesting, nuanced story than a textbook might. They could start with Times Topics pages like this one for Hamilton, or these for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.

Then they might …

– Compile a list of the top 10 most interesting facts about this person — with, of course, proper source-citation.

– Create an annotated map of this person’s world. To help, they might read this article about a New York City walking tour of “Hamilton’s old stomping grounds” for examples.

– Stage a classroom exhibit about their chosen character, perhaps like this New-York Historical Society installation on Hamilton.

– Or read on to use some of the other ideas in this post, from rap battles to social-media profiles to their own artistic interpretations of history in the genre of their choice.

Staging Historical Rap Battles

Daveed Diggs, left, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton” at the Richard Rodgers Theater. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton argue about the role of the federal government in a heated cabinet battle. Should the union assume the states’ debts? Should the country establish a national bank? They each have 60 seconds to make their case, and then the cabinet decides.

Lin-Manuel Miranda sees hip-hop as the music of the American Revolution — the vernacular of the founding fathers. As Anthony Tommasini writes:

On a basic level, the American Revolution was driven by words: fiery statements of principle; charges of imperialist oppression; accusations of betrayal; fine points of governance; even wordy obfuscations to gloss over disagreements that could have sabotaged the country at its start. What better musical genre to tell this tale?

Here is a selection from the battle:

Jefferson:

In Virginia, we plant seeds in the ground
We create. You just wanna move our money around
This financial plan is an outrageous demand
And it’s too many damn pages for any man to understand
Stand with me in the land of the free
And pray to God we never see Hamilton’s candidacy

Hamilton:
Thomas. That was a real nice declaration
Welcome to the present, we’re running a real nation
Would you like to join us, or stay mellow
Doin’ whatever the hell it is you do in Monticello?

Our country today is, of course, facing its own dilemma about the government’s role and the direction we should take, as demonstrated by this year’s fiery presidential primary battles. Why not have students create and perform their own rap battles about the issues that matter to them?

What other eras in history could be enlivened by rap battles between competing points of view? For instance, a student commenter to a “Hamilton”-related question on our blog suggested that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas rap instead of debate. “Imagine the way the words would flow from their mouths like clashing poetry and you watched as the topic of racism be brought out in an entire new light,” this student wrote.

And if that’s not enough of a challenge, students could consider freestyling, perhaps with a partner supplying relevant words to weave in, as Lin-Manuel Miranda recently did with the help of President Obama at the White House:

Digging into the Federalist Papers

A portrait of Alexander Hamilton from around 1806. National Gallery of Art/Getty Images

After gaining independence from the British in the American Revolution, the young United States adopted the Articles of Confederation to set up its new government. By design, the central government was very weak. After all, the people desperately did not want another King George.

But was the new national government too weak? The founding fathers thought so — and so they met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 and drafted a new Constitution that would set up a new framework for a stronger government.

Just because they wrote it, though, did not mean the country would adopt it. So Alexander Hamilton, along with James Madison and John Jay, rallied to the cause.

Invite your students to listen to “Non-Stop” as they learn about how Hamilton joined forces with Madison and Jay to write a series of essays defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers. The plan was to write a total of 25 essays, the work divided evenly among the three men. In the end, they wrote 85 essays over six months. John Jay got sick after writing five. James Madison wrote 29. Hamilton wrote the other 51!

In the musical, Hamilton asks Burr to help him write the Federalist Papers, but Burr declines, even as Hamilton argues:

Burr, we studied and we fought and we killed
For the notion of a nation we now get to build
For once in your life, take a stand with pride
I don’t understand how you stand to the side

What did Hamilton and the other founding fathers write in the 85 Federalists Papers? What arguments did they make in favor of the Constitution? And what was the response from anti-Federalists, the founding fathers who vocalized their concerns with the Constitution?

The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History has a four-lesson unit that explores the great debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, using excerpts from the Federalist Papers as a primary source. Ultimately, students, taking on the role of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, make their case as to why the Constitution is or is not in the best interests of the new nation as a whole.

You might then use some of our many resources for teaching with the Constitution, including Five Ways to Teach the Constitution Through Current Events and a Text to Text that pairs an Op-Ed, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution” with the document itself.

“Hamilton” Lyrics and Primary Sources

A statue of Alexander Hamilton on the grounds of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hamilton Heights.

Byron Smith for The New York Times

Even if you can’t see the show live, the 46 songs on the Broadway cast recording, and the many rich annotations — some by Lin-Manuel Miranda himself — at Genius.com can provide all kinds of interesting new ways to teach with primary sources your students may once have considered dry.

Here are a few possible pairings. We’d love to add more, so please suggest your ideas in the comments.

As they compare sources, students might use the three handouts we’ve created for our Text to Text series to help them make connections:

Taking Creative License With History

As Lin-Manuel Miranda says in the video above, some of his choices for the musical are not historically accurate, but made the story stronger dramatically. He also points out that the way “history” is told depends on who is telling the story.

Ron Chernow, the original biographer, was the “resident historian” as the show was developed, and describes here how he and Mr. Miranda worked to tell a true story in a way that “plucked out the dramatic essence.”

Invite your students to think about questions of historical accuracy and artistic license through exercises like the following:

– Choose a song or some lyrics from the show and annotate them to provide the historical back story. This post from Mental Floss explores 22 lyrics from the show, as do the many annotations on the Genius site.

– What works of art — whether literature, film, theater or visual arts — drawn from real events in history or the lives of real people, do you especially admire? How have they shaped how you view that person, time or place? Where and how was creative license taken? Did it strengthen or weaken the work? Why?

– What event in American history would you like to use as inspiration for your own creative piece? What would you do with it? Would you write a scene from a musical or novel, paint a picture, make a video or create a poem? To what extent would you need to take creative license with the facts? Why?

The page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook that refers to Africans brought to American plantations as “workers,” rather than slaves. Related Article Coby Burren

– Textbook portrayals of history can reduce events to such short summaries that nuances are flattened and important perspectives are missing. They can even misrepresent events or enshrine “ideological biases that are either outside the boundaries of established, mainstream scholarship, or just plain wrong.”

Our lesson plan about Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” suggests ways to compare tellings of events in American history, since Zinn’s work “shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.” Students might consider their own American history textbook, especially as it portrays the events “Hamilton” covers, and then try to answer some of the questions we pose in that lesson, such as:

  • Is there a way to write history completely objectively? Or, do historians always add some form of personal bias?
  • Is it important, in your opinion, that historians use primary sources in their exploration of history?
  • How do you most like to learn about history? Why?

“Hamilton” and Politics Today

Related Article Ji Lee

“Rarely has political theater overlapped so much with political theatrics,” wrote Patrick Healy in an August 2015 piece, “ ‘Hamilton’ and the Republican Hopefuls.” The characters on the debate stage and the Broadway stage are remarkably in sync, he writes: “brazen, unpredictable, even outrageous”:

In one scene Hamilton drops a thick batch of papers several feet to the floor, a screed against John Adams that lands like a punch — a moment that mirrors Senator Lindsey Graham’s dropping his cellphone from a roof, in a recent video, to mock his rival Mr. Trump for giving out his number. (In another video, Rand Paul takes a chain saw to a stack of papers meant to be the federal tax code.) Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry and Mr. Trump have also embraced a call-it-as-I-see-it style of attack that calls to mind one of Hamilton’s slaps at Jefferson: “And another thing, Mr. Age of Enlightenment, don’t lecture me about the war, you didn’t fight in it.”

At times it’s today’s Republicans who seem more in tune with the blunt Hamilton and bombastic Jefferson of the musical. By contrast the leading Democratic candidate in the 2016 race, Hillary Rodham Clinton, occasionally seems like a kindred spirit of Aaron Burr, the Hamilton nemesis who would probably approve of Mrs. Clinton’s refusals to take a stand on the Keystone XL pipeline and the Pacific trade deal. As Burr puts it in one song:

Talk less!
Smile more!
Don’t let ’em know what you’re
Against or what you’re for.

The show has attracted real-life political figures since it first opened. President Obama liked it so much he’s seen it twice, and invited Mr. Miranda to the White House. Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton have been, as has Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, as well as the former Congressman Anthony D. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, an adviser to Ms. Clinton.

In this article, Ron Chernow points out that “The show certainly celebrates characters we wish we had on the national stage now, but it’s also a cautionary tale. Americans have this image of the founding as a golden age. In fact, things lapsed very quickly into the kind of partisan warfare we see today.”

Ask students where they see parallels between the show and what The Times recently called “the most surreal presidential campaign in modern times.” How is this election like the election of 1800?

How are the same things at issue? Who do the characters in “Hamilton” remind you of today? What might politicians learn from the show? And finally, a possible class debate topic: Were partisan politics nastier then or now?

The Effects of Nonwhite Casting

From left, Daveed Diggs, Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. from the cast of “Hamilton.” Damon Winter/The New York Times

In a conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda and other members of the “Hamilton” cast, a Times interviewer asks:

Q.

The founding fathers were white, and many owned black slaves. The cast of “Hamilton” is mostly nonwhite. Can you tell me about your thinking as you wrote and cast the show?

A.

Odom Jr.: In the first two minutes of this show, Lin steps forward and introduces himself as Alexander Hamilton, and Chris steps forward and says he’s George Washington, and you never question it again. When I think about what it would mean to me as a 13-, 14-year-old kid, to get this album or see this show — it can make me very emotional. And I so look forward to the day I get to see an Asian-American Burr.

A.

Miranda: That’ll be the note that goes with the school productions: If this show ends up looking like the actual founding fathers, you messed up.

What effect do you think the “Hamilton” casting choices have on its audience? How does it change your understanding of the events, the characters and the issues? Why? How would the show be different with an all-white cast? What other lessons does “Hamilton” have for questions of race in casting?

What classic films, television shows or works of theater might change in interesting and important ways if cast differently than they were originally? How?

Burr vs. Hamilton

We stop the press to announce the melancholy intelligence that Gen. Hamilton is dead. He expired about 2:30 o’clock.

– According to this 1904 Times article, that is how the first mention of Alexander Hamilton’s death read, from the newspaper the Commercial Advertiser.

On July 11, 1804, on a rocky ledge above the Hudson River in New Jersey, Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the former secretary of the Treasury, met to engage in a lethal game of honor. A single shot from Burr’s pistol ended Hamilton’s life, begins a recent review of “War of Two,” a book by the novelist and biographer John Sedgwick about the two men’s relationship.

Who was Aaron Burr? How were he and Hamilton both alike and different? Watch the video above and read the book review to begin answering those questions. How does Mr. Miranda play up their contrasts while exploring the complexities of their relationship?

In July of 1904, The Times reflected on “The Burr-Hamilton Duel One Hundred Years Ago”

Original 1904 Times article (PDF)

What do you learn from this piece about how Americans viewed Hamilton and Burr in their time? One hundred years later?

Immigrants/We get the job done

Visit the 2009 interactive Immigration Explorer

This article points out that the lyric “Immigrants/We get the job done” from “ Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” is such a reliable applause line on Broadway that the creators have lengthened the pause that follows to allow time for the sound to die down.

The ensemble sings:

I am not throwin’ away my shot!
I am not throwin’ away my shot!
Hey yo, I’m just like my country, I’m young
Scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwin’ away my shot!
I am not throwin’ away my shot!

In an interview in The Atlantic, Lin-Manuel Miranda says:

I didn’t know Hamilton was an immigrant, and I didn’t know half of the traumas of his early life. And when he gets to New York, I was like, “I know this guy.” I’ve met so many versions of this guy, and it’s the guy who comes to this country and is like, “I am going to work six jobs if you’re only working one. I’m gonna make a life for myself here.” That’s a familiar story line to me, beginning with my father and so many people I grew up with in my neighborhood. So … every play or work of fiction kind of has to start with you identifying a character and saying, “I know this guy. I could write that guy.” And I kind of ran with that.

He points out that right now “immigrant is used as a dirty word by politicians to get cheap political points.”

Go through The Times to find stories about immigrants today that fit the description of the immigrant spirit that Lin-Manuel Miranda describes and “Hamilton” illustrates. How are they lending their energy and talents to our nation?

You might then use our many, many resources on immigration to go deeper. For example:

Behind Every Great Man Is a Great Woman

Mr. Miranda and Phillipa Soo in the musical. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

While most students are aware of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton thanks to American history class, they are less aware of the women who also played a role in the revolution.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s wife, is credited with helping her husband draft essays, letters and even our financial system. She lived for 50 years beyond her husband’s death and helped found the Orphan Asylum Society, New York City’s first private orphanage, which she directed. (Today the Orphan Asylum Society still exists as Graham Windham.) She also helped raise money for the Washington Monument and organized her husband’s papers to preserve his legacy.

Have students read Smithsonian Magazine’s “Why Elizabeth Schuyler is Deserving of a Musical of Her Own.”

Last summer the United States Treasury Department announced plans to put a woman on the $10 bill, possibly replacing Hamilton. Interestingly, however, “Hamilton” may have just saved Hamilton:

Ask students to nominate a woman to be featured on U.S. currency after reading about the process. Encourage them to research the women who don’t often receive credit for the work they do — women like Elizabeth Schuyler.

Ideas for English Language Arts and Performing Arts

Excerpt: ‘Hamilton’

The cast of the Broadway musical performing the number “The Schuyler Sisters.”

By HAMILTON on August 6, 2015.

“Hamilton” Word Play and Vocabulary:

When students lament that they will never need to know those esoteric vocabulary words, show them some lines from “Hamilton”:

There would have been nothin’ left to do
For someone less astute
He woulda been dead or destitute
Without a cent of restitution

As we’ve learned from our colleagues at Vocabulary.com, language like this has a way of resonating. One high school student used the site to create vocabulary lists to help understand the play, and she ended up getting those lists retweeted by Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

Have students listen to the lyrics. What words do they need to look up? Can they figure out the meanings based on the context? What language and rhymes do they especially admire?

What are your student’s favorite lines? Why?

Just one of many student productions of a song from “Hamilton” to be found on YouTube.

Rhetorical and Poetic Devices: Shakespeare and Miranda

Related Essay Martha Rich

Like Shakespeare, Lin-Manuel Miranda relies on alliteration, anaphora, and many other rhetorical devices to create the magic in his music. And, like Shakespeare, his work is meant to be heard (and seen) to be appreciated.

A blog post from the American Shakespeare Center about “What Shakespeare and Broadway’s Biggest Hit Have to Do with Each Other” points out:

One of the reasons Shakespeare stands above his contemporaries is that he had such a great ear. His characters have individual voices. They don’t all speak in the same patterns, but rather, he defines each speaker by particular quirks and habits — just as we speak in everyday life. Miranda does the same thing.

Read the post to learn how “anyone who can understand and enjoy Hamilton can understand and enjoy Shakespeare,” and to see the writer’s analysis of rhetorical patterns in songs like “Stay Alive” and “Satisfied.” After students have identified the techniques in “Hamilton,” ask them to look for similar uses in Shakespeare. What do the two have in common?

How might students take a song from “Hamilton” or a soliloquy from Shakespeare and use the technique of “copy-change” to write their own new versions?

Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Musical Influences

The Times delved into the influences on “Hamilton” in this piece, which points out that “Hamilton ” is “a product of Mr. Miranda’s own polyglot palate”:

The 35-year-old son of Puerto Rican parents, raised in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood of northern Manhattan and educated at a public school for gifted children on the Upper East Side, Mr. Miranda is an exuberant fanboy who happily tweets mash-ups of lyrics from Drake and “The Little Mermaid,” knowing that almost no one will get the joke.

He recognized early that hip-hop and show tunes, even with their different sounds and audiences, share an emphasis on storytelling — both musical styles are animated by lyrics that advance narrative, and that understanding shaped “Hamilton,” which he conceived, wrote the music and lyrics for, and stars in.

Latin music was big in the Miranda home, in Inwood, and in Puerto Rico, where Mr. Miranda spent his summers. But rap and hip-hop were woven into his childhood as well.

Have students read the piece and listen to and read about the playlist, above, to see what influences they can identify in the “Hamilton” soundtrack.

Hip-Hop History and “Hamilton”

As he read Ron Chernow’s biography, Lin-Manuel Miranda was struck by the parallels between Hamilton and rappers today. As he says in this conversation:

“By the second chapter, I was like, ‘I know this guy,’ ” Mr. Miranda said. “Just the hustle and ambition it took to get him off the island — this is a guy who wrote his way out of his circumstances from the get-go. That is part and parcel with the hip-hop narrative: writing your way out of your circumstances, writing the future you want to see for yourself. This is a guy who wrote at 14, ‘I wish there was a war.’ It doesn’t get more hip-hop than that.”

Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times and an avowed musical theater enthusiast, spoke with Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The Times, about “Hamilton” and its influences in “Exploring ‘Hamilton’ and Hip-Hop Steeped in Heritage.” Mr. Caramanica observes:

Hip-hop is a native tongue to him, but he’s putting it in service of the musical. His hip-hop references are expedient first, winks to those in the know second, and true to the genre’s tenets last. There is a nerd instinct in hip-hop, particularly lyrically minded hip-hop — it can be collegiate at times. What inspires Miranda is assonance, polysyllabic rhyme, cramming bars full of detail. He’s also someone who understands rapping as a game of one-upmanship — hence the pair of scenes in which Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson face off, which could have come from “8 Mile” or Scribble Jam.

Mr. Caramanica goes on to cite references to Mobb Deep, LL Cool J, Jay Z, and, as he says:

Biggie, Biggie, Biggie. For a certain stripe of hip-hop fan, Biggie is the ne plus ultra. I’ve got all of “Ready to Die” and “Life After Death” committed to memory, and I suspect Miranda does, too. “10 Duel Commandments” is, natch, a remake of “10 Crack Commandments,” with its same blend of horror and pathos. And the “if you don’t know, now you know” Jefferson drops in “Cabinet Battle No. 2” is straight out of “Juicy.”

Recently, Mr. Miranda told Kanye West that he’d drawn inspiration from him for Hamilton’s character — and others have suggested that the Schuyler sisters “were the Kardashians” of 1780 (though the show’s musical director Alex Lacamoire suggests Destiny’s Child is a better comparison).

What hip-hop history can your students unearth in “Hamilton”? If you need clues, the many annotations at Genius can help.

Social Media Skills

In “Rapping a Revolution,” Lin-Manuel Miranda says, “If Hamilton were on Twitter, he would have been a worse oversharer than me. Everything we know about Hamilton, we knew when he was alive, because he told us.”

The piece then points out:

Likewise, anyone who follows Mr. Miranda’s lively Twitter feed knows all about his 3-month-old son, his obsession with “Les Misérables” and the roster of celebrities and friends seeing his show on a given night. Before lunch, Mr. Miranda tweeted a photo of himself working on his laptop at the tavern, a Revolutionary War haunt of Hamilton’s and Burr’s, and the place where George Washington held a farewell dinner for his officers.

Follow Mr. Miranda to see what he posts, and note how he uses his powers for good — as well as just for fun.

Here’s something nice he recently did for his elementary-school music teacher, for instance. (After you watch, if you’d like to see the teacher’s reaction, visit this Facebook post.)

Invite students to take the historical or literary figure of their choice — whether Alexander Hamilton or Katniss Everdeen — and imagine what his or her social media presence might look like. What would their bios read? What images and status updates would they post? Whom would they follow, friend, retweet or repost? Why?

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?

In February 2015, Op-Ed columnist David Brooks wrote about “The Hamilton Experience” and reflected on how the show “asks you to think afresh about your country and your life.”

But the boldest stroke in Miranda’s musical is that he takes on the whole life — every significant episode. He shows how the active life is inevitably an accumulation of battles, setbacks, bruises, scars, victories and humiliating defeats.

He ends the column this way:

America changes color and shape, but the spirit Hamilton helped bring to the country still lives. I suspect many people will leave the theater wondering if their own dreams and lives are bold enough, if their own lives could someday be so astounding.

In this interview, Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about the final song in the show, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”

“‘We could all be dead tomorrow,’’ Miranda says. ‘‘Who tells our story? Will it be told? We have no way of knowing. In essence, that’s what the show is about.'”

…‘‘ ‘Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?’ It’s a question for the characters on that stage, and it’s also a question for the audience. It leaves you reckoning with: Wait, who does tell my story? What am I doing with my life? I think that’s why, when I get emails about this show from people in the audience, they usually come at three in the morning. They’re dark-night-of-the-soul emails. Because it’s a question we’re all grappling with. It’s a question that we all pose at the end.’’

How would your students answer those questions?

This Newsweek article about how teachers are using the lessons of “Hamilton” in the classroom mentions Lisa Kowalski, a teacher at New York City’s Democracy Prep. After they saw the show, she assigned her students to write their own obituaries in order to consider their legacies.

We’ve asked students to do this on our blog, too. To help, they might visit the Times Obituaries section and find a person who interests them. What do they notice about the “accumulation of battles, setbacks, bruises, scars, victories and humiliating defeats” that make it into the report? How was this person’s story told?

How will yours be told? As Eliza asks in the song,

And when my time is up
Have I done enough?
Will they tell my story?

Standards

This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.

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