Development Unit: Alexander Hamilton
Who gets to tell your story? What does it mean to recreate a person’s story 200 years after their death? Lin Manuel Miranda tells us the story of one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, in Hamilton: An American Musical. In this unit, we will read a series of related texts to explore the following question: How do storytellers use primary sources? Our focus will be to consider how Miranda interpreted primary and secondary sources to create the musical. We will practice this process by researching a person and event from the Founding Era, using primary and secondary sources. To demonstrate our understanding of how authors use primary sources, we will write our own song lyrics about a relevant person from the Founding Era, and we will analyze and explain how our use of primary and secondary sources affected our writing.