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Do you have any clue how expensive and hard to get tickets to HAMILTON are? The idea that said show has had any impact on how Americans understand history is beyond lunatic.
Since he has claimed that no one mistakes the Lynn Manuel Miranda broadway travesty "Hamilton" as accurate history, here's this from one of New York Cities' more prestigious cultural foundations.
The Hamilton Education Program is expanding nationwide for the 2017-2018 school year, as the musical Hamilton goes on tour.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is proud to partner with Hamilton and The Rockefeller Foundation on the Hamilton Education Program. Title I high schools are being invited to see the musical and to integrate Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Era into classroom studies. The Hamilton Education Program is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s broader mission to improve the teaching and learning of American history. Made possible through a grant by The Rockefeller Foundation to the Gilder Lehrman Institute, high school students in Title I schools in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, St. Louis, Houston, Salt Lake City, and selected cities will each pay just a “Hamilton” ($10) to see the performance.
The Institute has more than twenty years of experience developing educational programming in American history. In addition, the Gilder Lehrman Collection is a unique archive of 65,000 primary sources, including a love letter from Alexander Hamilton to his fiancée, Elizabeth Schuyler.
To learn more about the program and to explore documents, essays, and videos relating to Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Era, visit the links below and go to “Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination,” a special issue of our online journal History Now. For additional information on New York, and other tour cities, please contact hamilton@gilderlehrman.org. For additional information on Chicago, please contact hamiltonchi@gilderlehrman.org.
Thus introducing even more of a new generation into complete bull shit about the "Founding Fathers," as heroes. In fact one of the sleazier ones who is presented as an opponent of slavery when he not only explicitly supported its continuation in the United States, as I pointed out, he argued for the adoption of the slavery-enabling, slavery-enhancing and anti-democratic features of the Constitution on the basis of its profitability for northern financial interests. The whole thing is a crock of shit encouraging the federalist fascism that is engulfing the progress made against the Constitution in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Hamilton" is crap, two of the best short articles I've read pointing out some of the most glaring problems with it are by the estimable Ishmael Reed.
The best argument that I know for the advocacy of such schools came from a Jewish professor who attended Hebrew School before public schools. When a public school teacher praised the Crusades, she was able to point out that the Crusaders set up pogroms.
In the heady times during the slave revolt of the 1960s, the rebels boasted about how they were using the enemy’s language and how they were “stealing his language.” Now things have been turned upside down. Now the masters, the producers of this profit hungry production, which has already made 30 million dollars, are using the slave’s language: Rock and Roll, Rap and Hip Hop to romanticize the careers of kidnappers, and murderers. People, who, like Jefferson, beat and fucked his slaves and spied on their fucking.
The very clever salesman for this project is Lin-Manuel Miranda. He compares Hamilton, a man who engaged in cruel practices against those who had been kidnapped from their ancestral homes, with that of a slave, Tupac Shakur. He is making profits for his investors with glib appeals such as this one. The first week’s box office take was $1,153,386.
Your show biz liberals won't mention such stuff in polite company, I'm not one of them.
And Reed followed up, two years ago yesterday in which he noted the criticism of a number of historians:
Professor Michelle Duross, of the University at Albany, State University of New York, is much more direct and shows what happens when someone from a class, whose voice has been neglected, invades the all-white male country club of historians. Unlike Chernow, her treatment of Hamilton as a slave trader is not couched in equivocating qualifiers that are favorable to this founding father, I wrote. She takes to task the Hamilton biographies written by his awe-struck groupies:
“Alexander Hamilton’s biographers praise Hamilton for being an abolitionist, but they have overstated Hamilton’s stance on slavery.
“Historian John C. Miller insisted, ‘He [Hamilton] advocated one of the most daring invasions of property rights that was ever made– the abolition of Negro slavery.’
“Biographer Forrest McDonald maintained, ‘Hamilton was an abolitionist, and on that subject he never wavered.’”
She writes, “Hamilton’s position on slavery is more complex than his biographers’ suggest.” Some historians maintain that Hamilton’s birth on the island of Nevis and his subsequent upbringing in St. Croix instilled in him a hatred for the brutalities of slavery. Historian James Oliver Horton suggests that Hamilton’s childhood surrounded by the slave system of the West Indies “would shape Alexander’s attitudes about race and slavery for the rest of his life.’”
She writes,
“No existing documents of Hamilton’s support this claim. Hamilton never mentioned anything in his correspondence about the horrors of plantation slavery in the West Indies.
“Hamilton’s involvement in the selling of slaves suggests that his position against slavery was not absolute. Besides marrying into a slaveholding family, Hamilton conducted transactions for the purchase and transfer of slaves on behalf of his in-laws and as part of his assignment in the Continental Army.”
I cited another historian, Allan McLane Hamilton, who writes to counter the claim that Hamilton never owned slaves: “[Hamilton] never owned a negro slave… is untrue. In his books, we find that there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.” Why isn’t this entry regarded as a smoking gun? After creating the Hamilton mania, which the Times began in 2012, and which one letter writer termed the Times coverage as “Daily Worship,” the newspaper acknowledged that there was dissent. Finally. It came in Jennifer Schuesslera’s April 10, 2016 article entitled “Hamilton’ and History: Are They in Sync? ” She described the dissent. Critics, according to her, claim that “Hamilton”:
“over-glorifies the man, inflating his opposition to slavery while glossing over less attractive aspects of his politics, which were not necessarily as in tune with contemporary progressive values as audiences leaving the theater might assume.”
In a note to me she acknowledges that she read my August 21st CounterPunch piece but traced the beginning of “Hamilton” dissent to a September response by David Waldstreicher’s to remarks made by historian Joseph Adelman, who claimed that Miranda “got the history right.”
She wrote that Waldstreicher, a historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, “sounded an early note of skepticism on The Junto, a group blog about early American history.” (Apparently CounterPunch is a name that dare not be mentioned at the Times.) Waldstreicher wrote, “Nobody’s pointing out the pattern of exaggerating Hamilton’s (and other Federalists’) antislavery….” Exaggeration is to put it mildly; nowhere in his comments does Waldstreicher say that Hamilton actually owned slaves. Nobody pointed out that Hamilton’s antislavery has been exaggerated? (Hamilton’s mother also owned slaves and in her will, left the slaves to Hamilton and his brother.) Professors Michelle Duross and Alan McLane among others have pointed it out. Maybe he, like Miranda reads only the Good Old Boys and Girls of the American Historical Establishment.
Professor Lyra D. Monteiro’s article in the journal The Public Historian was also cited. She wrote,
“the show’s multiethnic casting obscures the almost complete lack of identifiable African-American characters, making the country’s founding seem like an all-white affair.
“It’s an amazing piece of theater, but it concerns me that people are seeing it as a piece of history.”
“The founders,” she added, “really didn’t want to create the country we actually live in today.”
Yesterday I noted that the scholar Yascha Mounk, in his book and his speaking about it bemoaned the unwillingness of We The People to deal with complex ideas, something I acknowledge but reject any elitist view of that as limiting the legitimacy of the only legitimate form of government, egalitarian democracy. Most of the ideas necessary for government of, by and for THE PEOPLE, do not depend on any such complex articulation. And for those ideas the maintenance of an honest, principled, competent staff at the permanent institutions of government can go a long way to dealing with those things on our behalf, with checks on the influence of corruption from the rich and powerful and ideologically motivated. Many instances of that in our history might be brought up as well as instances that indicate that it isn't fail safe. NOTHING about any governance is.
But one of the biggest dangers, as it turns out is that in the absence of a knowledge of our history in all its frequent squalor and infrequent glory, movies, TV shows and to a lesser extent fiction can put a false narrative in the empty space in which an accurate knowledge of history belongs. I have pointed out that we know, from the testimony of the man who recreated the Klu Klux Klan, that his great inspiration was the movie Birth of a Nation, we know that many of even PhD level college degree holders, even history, know little to no more about the Scopes Trial and its aftermath than what they've seen in the fictitious movie and blatant misrepresentation of Inherit The Wind. And we have the testimony from the past, such as Mark Twain's assertion that if so many people in the slave holding states hadn't read the drivel written by Sir Walter Scott that the Civil War might never have happened. The entire phenomeon of resurgent fascism in the United States is a product of Hollywood movies and TV shows that lie about the Civil War (Gone With The Wind, probably the worst offender) race, the phonied-up, lily white racist genre of Westerns and the fascist chic movies of the Reagan years. That Donald Trump, the quintessential American fascist as president is entirely a product of American TV and pop culture, his candidacy originating in a publicity stunt to further his show-biz career, pushed by cabloid and entertainment TV that gave him billions of dollars of free air time during his campaign (Joe and Mika hardly the least guilty of that) and now trying to be revived through the efforts of his fellow walking. tweeting mental case Roseanne Barr provides all the evidence an honest rational person would need to prove that American show biz is not only not innocent and innocuous, it is one of the foremost tools of oligarchic fascism.
That the American left has been led by the nose in denying that by pseudo-lefties who publish magazines, who produce, direct, write and act in the very medium and the legal and academic hacks who work for show biz and the porn industry is conclusive evidence that even when they are credentialed by colleges, they're as big a bunch of suckers for crappy movies and other entertainment as the Trump voters. More so, they've been the biggest bunch of chumps for that whole thing, supporting the freedom of the tools of oligarchy and denying its obvious potency in damaging egalitarian democracy.
It turns out the most effective means of destroying American democracy wasn't subversion through ideologies or by terrorist or military attack, it was in getting a bunch of college educated suckers to buy phony history and phony ideas created of, by and for the oligarchs, the billionaires foreign and domestic. That bunch, especially on the play-left, are no wiser for the experience of the last eighteen years than they were when so many of them helped put Bush II in office. They are too stupid to allow them to run the left, we need one that's smart and not wowed by production values, satin costumes and glitz and sentimentally told lies. They haven't even caught up with the ones they bought in about 1962.
Thus introducing even more of a new generation into complete bull shit about the "Founding Fathers," as heroes. In fact one of the sleazier ones who is presented as an opponent of slavery when he not only explicitly supported its continuation in the United States, as I pointed out, he argued for the adoption of the slavery-enabling, slavery-enhancing and anti-democratic features of the Constitution on the basis of its profitability for northern financial interests. The whole thing is a crock of shit encouraging the federalist fascism that is engulfing the progress made against the Constitution in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Hamilton" is crap, two of the best short articles I've read pointing out some of the most glaring problems with it are by the estimable Ishmael Reed.
The best argument that I know for the advocacy of such schools came from a Jewish professor who attended Hebrew School before public schools. When a public school teacher praised the Crusades, she was able to point out that the Crusaders set up pogroms.
In the heady times during the slave revolt of the 1960s, the rebels boasted about how they were using the enemy’s language and how they were “stealing his language.” Now things have been turned upside down. Now the masters, the producers of this profit hungry production, which has already made 30 million dollars, are using the slave’s language: Rock and Roll, Rap and Hip Hop to romanticize the careers of kidnappers, and murderers. People, who, like Jefferson, beat and fucked his slaves and spied on their fucking.
The very clever salesman for this project is Lin-Manuel Miranda. He compares Hamilton, a man who engaged in cruel practices against those who had been kidnapped from their ancestral homes, with that of a slave, Tupac Shakur. He is making profits for his investors with glib appeals such as this one. The first week’s box office take was $1,153,386.
Your show biz liberals won't mention such stuff in polite company, I'm not one of them.
And Reed followed up, two years ago yesterday in which he noted the criticism of a number of historians:
Professor Michelle Duross, of the University at Albany, State University of New York, is much more direct and shows what happens when someone from a class, whose voice has been neglected, invades the all-white male country club of historians. Unlike Chernow, her treatment of Hamilton as a slave trader is not couched in equivocating qualifiers that are favorable to this founding father, I wrote. She takes to task the Hamilton biographies written by his awe-struck groupies:
“Alexander Hamilton’s biographers praise Hamilton for being an abolitionist, but they have overstated Hamilton’s stance on slavery.
“Historian John C. Miller insisted, ‘He [Hamilton] advocated one of the most daring invasions of property rights that was ever made– the abolition of Negro slavery.’
“Biographer Forrest McDonald maintained, ‘Hamilton was an abolitionist, and on that subject he never wavered.’”
She writes, “Hamilton’s position on slavery is more complex than his biographers’ suggest.” Some historians maintain that Hamilton’s birth on the island of Nevis and his subsequent upbringing in St. Croix instilled in him a hatred for the brutalities of slavery. Historian James Oliver Horton suggests that Hamilton’s childhood surrounded by the slave system of the West Indies “would shape Alexander’s attitudes about race and slavery for the rest of his life.’”
She writes,
“No existing documents of Hamilton’s support this claim. Hamilton never mentioned anything in his correspondence about the horrors of plantation slavery in the West Indies.
“Hamilton’s involvement in the selling of slaves suggests that his position against slavery was not absolute. Besides marrying into a slaveholding family, Hamilton conducted transactions for the purchase and transfer of slaves on behalf of his in-laws and as part of his assignment in the Continental Army.”
I cited another historian, Allan McLane Hamilton, who writes to counter the claim that Hamilton never owned slaves: “[Hamilton] never owned a negro slave… is untrue. In his books, we find that there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.” Why isn’t this entry regarded as a smoking gun? After creating the Hamilton mania, which the Times began in 2012, and which one letter writer termed the Times coverage as “Daily Worship,” the newspaper acknowledged that there was dissent. Finally. It came in Jennifer Schuesslera’s April 10, 2016 article entitled “Hamilton’ and History: Are They in Sync? ” She described the dissent. Critics, according to her, claim that “Hamilton”:
“over-glorifies the man, inflating his opposition to slavery while glossing over less attractive aspects of his politics, which were not necessarily as in tune with contemporary progressive values as audiences leaving the theater might assume.”
In a note to me she acknowledges that she read my August 21st CounterPunch piece but traced the beginning of “Hamilton” dissent to a September response by David Waldstreicher’s to remarks made by historian Joseph Adelman, who claimed that Miranda “got the history right.”
She wrote that Waldstreicher, a historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, “sounded an early note of skepticism on The Junto, a group blog about early American history.” (Apparently CounterPunch is a name that dare not be mentioned at the Times.) Waldstreicher wrote, “Nobody’s pointing out the pattern of exaggerating Hamilton’s (and other Federalists’) antislavery….” Exaggeration is to put it mildly; nowhere in his comments does Waldstreicher say that Hamilton actually owned slaves. Nobody pointed out that Hamilton’s antislavery has been exaggerated? (Hamilton’s mother also owned slaves and in her will, left the slaves to Hamilton and his brother.) Professors Michelle Duross and Alan McLane among others have pointed it out. Maybe he, like Miranda reads only the Good Old Boys and Girls of the American Historical Establishment.
Professor Lyra D. Monteiro’s article in the journal The Public Historian was also cited. She wrote,
“the show’s multiethnic casting obscures the almost complete lack of identifiable African-American characters, making the country’s founding seem like an all-white affair.
“It’s an amazing piece of theater, but it concerns me that people are seeing it as a piece of history.”
“The founders,” she added, “really didn’t want to create the country we actually live in today.”
Yesterday I noted that the scholar Yascha Mounk, in his book and his speaking about it bemoaned the unwillingness of We The People to deal with complex ideas, something I acknowledge but reject any elitist view of that as limiting the legitimacy of the only legitimate form of government, egalitarian democracy. Most of the ideas necessary for government of, by and for THE PEOPLE, do not depend on any such complex articulation. And for those ideas the maintenance of an honest, principled, competent staff at the permanent institutions of government can go a long way to dealing with those things on our behalf, with checks on the influence of corruption from the rich and powerful and ideologically motivated. Many instances of that in our history might be brought up as well as instances that indicate that it isn't fail safe. NOTHING about any governance is.
But one of the biggest dangers, as it turns out is that in the absence of a knowledge of our history in all its frequent squalor and infrequent glory, movies, TV shows and to a lesser extent fiction can put a false narrative in the empty space in which an accurate knowledge of history belongs. I have pointed out that we know, from the testimony of the man who recreated the Klu Klux Klan, that his great inspiration was the movie Birth of a Nation, we know that many of even PhD level college degree holders, even history, know little to no more about the Scopes Trial and its aftermath than what they've seen in the fictitious movie and blatant misrepresentation of Inherit The Wind. And we have the testimony from the past, such as Mark Twain's assertion that if so many people in the slave holding states hadn't read the drivel written by Sir Walter Scott that the Civil War might never have happened. The entire phenomeon of resurgent fascism in the United States is a product of Hollywood movies and TV shows that lie about the Civil War (Gone With The Wind, probably the worst offender) race, the phonied-up, lily white racist genre of Westerns and the fascist chic movies of the Reagan years. That Donald Trump, the quintessential American fascist as president is entirely a product of American TV and pop culture, his candidacy originating in a publicity stunt to further his show-biz career, pushed by cabloid and entertainment TV that gave him billions of dollars of free air time during his campaign (Joe and Mika hardly the least guilty of that) and now trying to be revived through the efforts of his fellow walking. tweeting mental case Roseanne Barr provides all the evidence an honest rational person would need to prove that American show biz is not only not innocent and innocuous, it is one of the foremost tools of oligarchic fascism.
That the American left has been led by the nose in denying that by pseudo-lefties who publish magazines, who produce, direct, write and act in the very medium and the legal and academic hacks who work for show biz and the porn industry is conclusive evidence that even when they are credentialed by colleges, they're as big a bunch of suckers for crappy movies and other entertainment as the Trump voters. More so, they've been the biggest bunch of chumps for that whole thing, supporting the freedom of the tools of oligarchy and denying its obvious potency in damaging egalitarian democracy.
It turns out the most effective means of destroying American democracy wasn't subversion through ideologies or by terrorist or military attack, it was in getting a bunch of college educated suckers to buy phony history and phony ideas created of, by and for the oligarchs, the billionaires foreign and domestic. That bunch, especially on the play-left, are no wiser for the experience of the last eighteen years than they were when so many of them helped put Bush II in office. They are too stupid to allow them to run the left, we need one that's smart and not wowed by production values, satin costumes and glitz and sentimentally told lies. They haven't even caught up with the ones they bought in about 1962.
I understand the cast recording of "Hamilton" is quite popular, and readily available. The Lovely Wife has season tickets to musical roadshow productions, and the one next month is "Hamilton." It didn't cost her hundreds of $$ or a trip to NYC, either.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that major and famous theater productions are only available to the Broadway-going audience is beyond lunatic. Besides, tickets wouldn't be both outrageously expensive and hard to get if the show weren't popular, and all things popular are, by definition, influential; so his argument is, on its own terms, beyond lunatic.
There's an awful lot to unpack here but I do think it worth pointing out that you're adopting the same simplistic view of history that you are damning forms or popular media for using.
ReplyDeleteThe KKK certainly was assisted in its resurgence by 'Birth Of A Nation,' but racism existed long before movies and I doubt people suffering economic hardships needed to be convinced that their skin color made them superior by a movie. Nor was the Civil War entirely the product of Scott's novels and I can guaran-damn-tee you that Donald Trump's election was as much the product of social, cultural and economic factors as the press's preoccupation with the circus that was his campaign.
'Hamilton' is a musical about a founding father scored to hip-hop with a cast of minorities. That some think it comprehensive, accurate history only reveals how childishly people approach the experience of art. I greatly admire Caravaggio's "Crucifixion of St. Peter" but never thought, "It happened JUST like that!" I think sensible people can enjoy 'Hamilton' the same way.
First, we know the KKK was moribund in 1915 because it wouldn't be a revival of it if it hadn't been. We also know that its revival was inspired by Birth of a Nation, because the man who revived it, William Joseph Simmons, explicitly said that was his inspiration. We also know that all during its second manifestation Birth of a Nation was used to recruit and encourage people who joined the terrorist group and carried out terrorism and murders under it. Obviously there was racism apart from the KKK, to bring that point up as if I implied it is ridiculous, considering what I've said about it in the "Founding Fathers" etc. There were plenty of people in the KKK who were not poor, not struggling, not economically pressed. The heyday of its second period was in the 1920s, its massive parade in Washington DC didn't' come during the depression, it came in the boom year of 1925.
DeleteNor did I say that the Civil War was "entirely the product of Scott's novels," I pointed out what Mark Twain said on the topic.
What you think of Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, or I think of Hamilton means that large numbers of Americans have been sold a bill of goods about the fucking Founders and the inviolability of the text of their fucking, slavery enabling Constitution. Nor do the people who don't buy that prevent the Federalist fascists from overturning everything that has been accomplished to mitigate the horror of that document.
I don't for a minute believe you don't understand these points.