10 Lin-Manuel Miranda Composer, lyricist, actor Hilary Swift/The New York Times/Redux

Every American with a pulse by now knows that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton is a Broadway sensation. Since its debut a year ago, it has won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, received a record-breaking 16 Tony nominations, winning 11, and last fall apparently broke the Broadway record in advance sales.

But more than just being the hottest thing in American culture, Hamilton is an attempt to rewrite American history. Drawing from Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and working in rap, hip-hop and show tunes, Miranda has breathed new life into the story of one of the Founding Fathers, reframing the life of the first Treasury secretary as the story of a poor Caribbean immigrant from a broken home who succeeded thanks to relentless ambition. Hamilton no doubt takes liberties: Some critics say it overly reveres Hamilton, not to mention that its cast is mostly black and Latino; Miranda, whose parents are Puerto Rican, played the part of Hamilton until this summer. But these modern touches are meant to draw a line from the messiness of early-American politics to today’s. “I think the notion of our founders being these perfect men who got these stone tablets from the sky that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights is bullshit,” Miranda told Rolling Stone.

It’s sure been ages since a Broadway play had such resonance in politics; Miranda even successfully urged Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to keep the newly hip Hamilton on the front of the soon-to-be-redesigned $10 bill. And it’s no surprise that Miranda has become a supercelebrity in a year when anti-immigrant rhetoric has spiked. In fact, his critique of Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall has clear historical, even Hamiltonian resonances: “It’s such a malignant form of a very common American electoral disease,” Miranda has said, “which is, ‘Point at the newest people here and say they’re the reason you’re broke.’ That’s as old as time itself.”

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