Founders Chic

Academic historians debate the legacy of David McCullough

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Before the whole James Sweet presentism thing went down, American historians were on Twitter arguing about David McCullouugh. Over at History News Network, Rebecca Brenner Graham calls our attention to the debate that took place in the immediate wake of...

The return of Ben Franklin

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Historian Joseph Adelman calls our attention to a small Ben Franklin revival. Here is his piece at Slate: Benjamin Franklin is having a moment. For decades he has hovered on the periphery of popular representations of the American founding. This...

Joseph Ellis’s New Book is About the Founding Fathers

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Ellis is a productive writer and historian, but I can’t keep up with all his books about the founding fathers.  Here is a taste of Jeff Shesol’s review of his latest: American Dialogue: The Founders and Us: If the historian Joseph J....

Annette Gordon-Reed on "Hamilton"

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Hamilton the musical that is. In a recently published piece at Vox, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon-Reed argues that the “intense debates” surrounding the Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Broadway smash “don’t diminish the musical, they enrich it.” Here is a taste: Hamilton is...

Religion and "Hamilton"

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In his review of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Broadway hit “Hamilton,” Peter Manseau, the new curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, writes: “Miranda’s ingenious retelling of Revolutionary-era U.S. history studiously ignores common eighteenth-century notions of...

Wait a Minute! Is "Founders Chic" Okay Now?

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Many historians who are fascinated with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton seem to be saying “yes.”  Others, like Ken Owen of The Junto, say “no.” For the last thirty years, social historians of the American experience have been ragging on something they...