Dear Reader:

One of the funniest “Got Milk” commercials has to be the peanut butter sandwich stuffed in a contestants’ mouth with no milk left when he is asked the $10,000 question: “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” on a random phone contest selection.  Do watch and chuckle.

Original “got milk?” commercial – Who shot Alexander Hamilton …

Lin, Manuel Miranda (playwright/music, lyrics/actor) was on vacation a few years ago and bought the book Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, in an airport gift shop.

He told Sixty Minutes (last Sunday) that he had only read two chapters when his imagination took hold and the musical began unfolding in his mind. A week ago Sunday Hamilton was up for 16 Tony Awards and won 11….including Best Musical of 2016.

(Besides writing the script, creating the lyrics and song numbers (raps) for the musical, Miranda also stars in the leading role, Alexander Hamilton.

Miranda’s new vision of the Founding Fathers reflects the new, modern America over the original “white men” Founding Fathers by casting the leading roles of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Burr, etc. with African-American and Hispanic actors. Women hold their own, too, in this production through important decisions in forming the new country…no sewing allowed!

Maranda, like most Americans, admits he only knew two facts about Alexander Hamilton at the start…..he was on the ten dollar bill and he was killed in a duel by Vice-President Aaron Burr. (He must have forgotten about the “Got Milk” commercial.)

But over the course of the biography (I am wondering what will come first this summer….me finishing the book or summer ending…it is one l-o-n-g book!) Miranda realized that this amazing individual, who was born on the island of Nevis, illegitimate, no formal education, a dirt-poor immigrant who arrives in America during the American Revolution, was a figure in American History like no other.

A fictional writer couldn’t begin to create such a complex, complicated, extraordinary genius as this Founding Father if he tried.

In my mind, as a history teacher for over three decades, the highest praise that can be given an author/writer of non-fiction is that the story reads as if it is fiction. Ron Chernow and David McCulloch both have this amazingly talented gift. To take a subject, that could be quite boring, and turn it into a page-turner for the average American reader is nothing short of miraculous!

Let me give you one example of this writing talent of Chernow in the biography of Alexander Hamilton. In the first paragraph of the book he lets the very aged widow of Hamilton take center stage. She was known as “The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow.“( Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton)

“In the early 1850’s, few pedestrians strolling past the house on H street in Washington, near the White House, realized that the ancient widow seated by the window, knitting and arranging flowers, was the last surviving link to the glory days of the early republic. Fifty years earlier, on a rocky, secluded  ledge overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, Aaron Burr, the vice-president of the United States, had fired a mortal shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career. Hamilton was then forty-nine years old. Was it a benign or a cruel destiny that had compelled the widow to outlive her husband by half a century, struggling to raise seven children and surviving almost until eve of the Civil War? “

Pretty interesting start, right? Elizabeth would die at the age of 97 still fighting to “rescue  her husband’s historical reputation from the gross slanders that had tarnished it.”

The other day we talked about the difference between Columbus and Vespucci….the first a dreamer and the latter a reality-maker and documenter. The same can be said for the visionary rift between Jefferson’s future view of America and Hamilton’s….after reading these excerpts I think we can all agree, with the luxury of hindsight, that Hamilton was definitely the truer visionary.

“Hamilton was the “prophet of the capitalist  revolution in America.” While Jefferson promoted the “more ample view of political democracy,” Hamilton “possessed the finer sense of economic opportunity. He was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit.”

Jefferson’s “rosy agrarian rhetoric and slave-holding reality of democracy” is long gone. Not so Hamilton’s “ bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks.”

“Today we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.”

I hope I have given you enough tidbits to capture your interest in examining Alexander Hamilton’s life in more detail…after all that is what we history teachers do. As for me, when I finish the book, I am setting my goals on a ticket to the musical….when it goes on tour (2017) Atlanta appears to be one of the closest locations to us.

If my ship hasn’t come in by then….I will simply start paddling because somehow, some way (mark my words) I will see Hamilton, the musical! Rap on Founding Fathers!

So until tomorrow…Every time we read about a famous person in history…we must remember that “famous” doesn’t necessarily mean the brightest or smartest, or nicest, or most moralistic…it is simply the person who follows his/her dream and then turns it into reality… in “written memoirs.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Doodle graciously had Father’s Day dinner at her home. Then some of the family stopped by the house….Rutledge had gotten some children’s books for his birthday and was thrilled, Eva Cate was given a necklace of her great grandmother Dee-Dee by Aunt Pap and she, too, was thrilled. Hope everyone had a great Father’s Day!

Jackson, Eva Cate and Rutledge both tried out the tractor…Rutledge’s legs need to get a little bit longer….Eva Cate’s are long enough but she doesn’t have the strength to push the pedals hard enough to move it without some help from behind.

Tommy said to tell you, Jackson, that children back in the fifties must have been a lot stronger! (I told him of course we were.) Actually a little WD-40 should do the trick! A good work-out machine!

Rutledge might just have turned three, but he has already figured it out….you get more girls sitting outside the pool than in it…especially when you are a little cutie!