Reviewed by: Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past ed. by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter Kenneth Owen (bio) Keywords Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton! The Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, theater, musical theater, stage Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past. Edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Pp. 396. Paper, $27.95.) In Historians on Hamilton, editors Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter aim to take stock of America's "Hamilmania" and place Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical in broader historical and cultural context. Fifteen essays, divided into three sections—The Script, The Stage, and The Audience—look at Hamilton's historical claims, its position in relation to popular memory and theater history, and how it has attracted such enthusiasm from an ideologically and generationally diverse twenty-first-century audience. In so doing, Romano and Potter hope they will "help students and fans dig more deeply into the show" (2). The historical commentary focuses heavily on what Hamilton missed. The essays critique the show well, and at some length. The first five essays point out large gaps in the production's narrative on topics including finance (William Hogeland), politics (Joanne B. Freeman), race (Lyra D. Monteiro), slavery (Leslie M. Harris), and gender (Catherine Allgor). Allgor notes that it is easy to seem "churlish to criticize such a transformative piece of theater" (114); Joseph M. Adelman notes later "the risk of being read as a scold" (283). For the most part, the historians in the volume try to avoid this trap by praising the innovation and energy of the production itself. [End Page 151] Even then, however, the professors of theater in the volume pour some cold water on Hamilton's innovations. Elizabeth Wollman's essay highlights the long history of black Broadway shows. Brian Eugenio Herrera's journey inside the Broadway bubble focuses heavily on Hamilton's casting strategy, but notes that "as innovative as Miranda's casting concept was, it was not especially new" (229). Setting Hamilton in this broader context—historically and theatrically—is unquestionably a valuable exercise. As an early American scholar unfamiliar with theater history, I found Herrera's explanation of the development of different casting strategies especially valuable in understanding the place of Hamilton in the history of Broadway. The volume also engages meaningfully with questions of race and popular identity—most notably in Lyra Monteiro's award-winning essay on "The Erasure of the Black Past" and Patricia Herrera's personal reflections on her daughter's admiration for the character of Angelica Schuyler and the dissonance between the slave-owning historical figure and the onstage character. Broadly speaking, too, the reader of this volume will come away with considerably greater context explaining the world in which Alexander Hamilton lived. But the essays point to a broader difficulty confronting academics who decide to engage with the Hamilton phenomenon. A recurring theme in the essays is that Hamilton, in adopting the "Founders Chic" narrative of Ron Chernow's 2005 biography, inhabits intellectual ground either vacated or totally rejected by the modern academy. Hogeland's essay points out that historians have "largely ceded Hamilton to popular biographers who write within a publishing world where celebrating America's heritage and history sells" (37). Monteiro points out "there are few historians of color who work on the founding fathers," focusing instead on "projects that chip away at the exclusive past typified by the cult of the founders" (65). The intellectual world of Chernow and Miranda is so far removed from the animating concerns of the modern academy that it hinders the ability to have a meaningful conversation on what Hamilton says about history, culture, and the twenty-first century. Another recurring theme is perhaps more surprising—the remarkable convergence of the authors in choosing anecdotes with which to highlight Hamilton's cultural salience. Several essays address the controversy surrounding then Vice President-elect Mike Pence's visit to Broadway in [End Page 152] November 2016; CBS's 60 Minutes segment on the show and Lin-Manuel Miranda's turn at hosting Saturday Night Live also receive numerous...