“The World Turned Upside-Down”?: Understanding Hamilton and Public Performances of the Past on the Digital Stage

This study uses Hamilton: An American Musical as a case study for public history analysis. It sees the cultural, political, and technological conditions surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic as crucial turning points for re-evaluating Hamilton’s position as a cultural product of the Obama era. Hamilton is considered holistically. Key source materials include the Hamilton show, the Disney+ film and documentaries, the ‘Hamilton Education Program’ and the ‘Ham4Progress’ initiative. The thesis also considers Hamilton’s place in the digital sphere more broadly, as made manifest through the social media platforms of Twitter and Instagram along with popular news and other web pages. The different ‘stage-spaces’ occupied by Hamilton are approached with the conceptual frameworks of performativity and transmediality, bolstered by quantitative analysis of almost one million Tweets. Making visible the continued tensions in and around Hamilton as a cultural product, what emerges is an enterprise with a mythos built upon a distinct self-historicising urge – a product not only deep in conversation with its surrounding contexts, but which is part of those circumstances. In so doing, the thesis offers a methodological intervention in how to undertake public history practice in periods of ostensibly rapid technological, political, and cultural change.