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The Disney+ filmed version has fans wondering what’s accurate. Historians are fans, too, and they have answers, along with caveats. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/movies/hamilton-musical-history-facts.html When “Hamilton” premiered onstage in 2015, the musical attracted a big following among historians, who were delighted by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s unabashedly nerdy attention to primary documents and the scholarly literature. But historians being historians, they also offered plenty of footnotes, criticisms and correctives <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/theater/hamilton-and-history-are-they-in-sync.html>, which weren’t always appreciated by the show’s ardent fans, who saw a bunch of humorless, literal-minded scolds out to kill their buzz. Now, with the filmed version <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/movies/hamilton-review-disney-plus.html> streaming on Disney+, the critical questions about Alexander Hamilton and the show’s depiction of him are back, and they aren’t just coming from the ivory tower. On Friday, the director Ava DuVernay tweeted <https://twitter.com/ava/status/1279039448726958080> her appreciation for Miranda’s artistry, along with a blast at the real-life A.Ham, who was not the progressive paragon of multicultural democracy some who watch the show may assume. “Believed in manumission, not abolition,” she wrote. “Wrote violent filth about Native people. Believed in only elites holding political power and no term limits. And the banking innovation has troubled roots.” Historians, many of whom took part in a Twitter watch party under the hashtag #HATM (Historians at the Movies <https://wakelet.com/wake/lVIH-X32f-WF9t6CCvLjC>), took a generally milder tone, even as they reiterated some of their earlier caveats. Here’s what some of them have been saying about “Hamilton” — and Hamilton — since Miranda’s take on the “ten-dollar founding father” took America by storm. *Hamilton wasn’t an abolitionist? I’m confused.* Early in the show, Hamilton calls himself and his friends “revolutionary manumission abolitionists,” a line that raised a lot of eyebrows among scholars. Hamilton was genuinely antislavery, even if some scholars say the intensity of his opposition has been overstated. He was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society <https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/history/manumission-society.html>, created in 1785, which among other things, pushed for a gradual emancipation law in New York State. (Such a law was passed in 1799.) Manumission involved voluntary release by enslavers. Abolition was a more radical proposition, and Hamilton did not advocate it <https://twitter.com/WilliamHogeland/status/1280188921301917696>. And while he publicly criticized Thomas Jefferson’s views on the biological inferiority of Black people, the Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed has noted <https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/10/correcting-hamilton/> that his record and his writings from the 1790s until his death in 1804 include little to nothing against slavery. As the show indicates, Hamilton did support John Laurens’s 1779 plan to allow Black soldiers to fight in the Revolution (and many eventually did). But that’s as far as he went. “OK, Hamilton did not write pamphlets against slavery with Laurens,” Gordon-Reed tweeted <https://twitter.com/agordonreed/status/1279200848061530112> during the #HATM watch party, adding: “I hate to be that historian.” _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
