"They're learning songs they like and weirdly learning U.S. of them performing songs from this show," he says. "I get videos from 4-year-olds to college students. The playwright has heard from "lots of teachers and educators" about bringing Hamilton into their curriculum. What he never anticipated was the scope of the Hamilton teaching phenomenon. "I think teachers used just that one clip for the past six years as their intro to Hamilton." 1 YouTube comment has been, 'My teacher showed us this in APUSH,'" Miranda says. Since that video surfaced online, "the No. Miranda realized Hamilton would be useful for educators years before the show was completed, when he performed what would become its opening number at a White House event in 2009. "It's been kind of amazing to have my social studies teachers reach out." He was a first-generation city kid attending Hunter College High School and then Wesleyan University, where he wrote and directed an early draft of the play In the Heights, which opened on Broadway in 2008. "I basically lived in the English and communications department," he tells Newsweek.
The irony? Miranda, who also plays the title role, wasn't much of a social studies student in high school. "Many of our students are first-generation or second-generation Americans," Sprinkle says. The show ruminates heavily on Hamilton's status as a West Indies–born bastard child, and the immigration themes have resonated in the year of Donald Trump. But Hamilton is different, both because it's fashioned from hip-hop and rap (a genre largely absent on Broadway) and because it casts actors of color to depict, as Miranda put it, "old, dead white men." He's used songs from another Broadway show with a historical spine, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, in previous years, and once he schlepped 82 students to see All the Way, which starred Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Sprinkle recently played his students a few tracks from the show, including a back-and-forth between Hamilton and Jefferson. history and public policy at the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies. "It brings history to the classroom in such an exciting and engaging way," says Patrick Sprinkle, who teaches U.S. Thomas Jefferson presidential election of 1800. history–friendly issues like the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and the bitter Adams vs. And along the way, Hamilton delves deep into U.S. ("The thing about Hamilton's life," Lin-Manuel Miranda tells Newsweek, "is the truth is invariably more interesting than anything I could have made up.") Historian Ron Chernow (whose 2004 biography of the first secretary of the treasury inspired the script) has praised the musical for capturing Hamilton's ambition and his obsession with controlling his legacy. Yes, it takes creative liberties-the Founding Fathers didn't really spit rhymes or use phrases like "John Adams shat the bed"-but the story is historically sound. And Cullen isn't the only teacher mining Hamilton fever to get 16-year-olds enthused about the profoundly unsexy details of Revolutionary-era nation-building.īut for educators, the play's success is ripe with untapped teaching potential. Students will be asked to sift through primary sources like George Washington's farewell address and show tunes like "One Last Time" and "Washington on Your Side" one essay assignment is to pick a song from the cast recording and analyze it. He'll be teaching Hamilton: A Musical Inquiry in the fall. So Cullen did the inevitable: He designed an entire course centered on Hamilton (the figure) and Hamilton (the show). After noticing the Hamilton soundtrack made a dent in the Billboard 200 sales chart, he realized, "This has got tremendous cultural currency." "They were singing these songs the way they might sing the latest release from Drake or Adele," Cullen says. They blasted the Hamilton cast recording from their phones and devices. Then, in his advisory class in the fall, Cullen noticed his students had caught the bug. That was in the spring, before Hamilton debuted on Broadway. He was startled by how much he loved the show.
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