Broadway musical Hamilton: Giving Students Free Online Access to the Origins of U.S. History

The Hamilton Education Program (EduHam) is designed to improve the teaching and learning of American history with content from the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton and historic artifacts from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in NYC.  

Students use the Hamilton Education Program platform to research figures and events from early American history and, as in Miranda’s work, compose songs, poems, scenes or hip-hop numbers based on what they’ve learned. When taught in classrooms, students perform their work live for their classmates at the end of the unit. In an updated version based on remote learning, students post their performances online. Hamilton cast members choose the 10 best pieces of student work every week; they are then featured on the website and shared through social media.

In California, Hayward High School AP teacher Scott Buros says that the EduHam curriculum is a joy to teach. “Democracy, federalism … I have students genuinely excited about exploring these topics, which on the surface are pretty dry,” he said. “And they’re learning how to read and interpret original texts, which are written in a style we don’t use in contemporary America. It’s challenging, but they’re really excited about it.”

“This is the most exhilarating thing I’ve seen in 40 years as an educator,” says James G. Basker, professor of literary history at Barnard College and president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. “The founding era used to be the castor oil of history education, but it’s been re-invented as the most fun, most relevant part of the history curriculum. Lin-Manuel Miranda made this possible.”

The site includes 45 Founding Era figures, 14 historical events, 24 key documents and 175 supporting documents, video clips from Hamilton, and more—it is a rich, multi-layered resource for a key era of American history.. “The whole thing is the DNA of Hamilton,’” says  Basker. “It would feel good to us if EduHam and Hamilton were in the homes of hundreds of thousands and even millions of kids.” 

The Hamilton Education Program website includes:

Teaching Guides  —  curriculums for  students and teachers to page through online or download/print 

Research resources  — which allow students to search related artifacts by people, events, key documents and themes (African-Americans, Economics, International Relations, Religion, Love, Slavery, War, Women)

Interactive Timeline   —  featuring major events, treaties and acts throughout the time period which are supported by text, videos, historic documents and links to more information

Online Exhibition  — Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America exhibits portraits, historic maps, letters and objects—including the dueling pistols used by Hamilton and Aaron Burr 

Videos  —  which includes a shortcut to ‘featured videos’ that directly support classroom projects, and supplemental videos that include clips from the show performed by the cast; examples of original student performances; video interviews with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, book author Ron Chernow, and the cast 

Genius Song Analysis  — which includes a video of Lin-Manual Miranda performing key songs, with an interactive transcript highlighting meaningful lyrics eg: “I wanna talk about neutrality”  that link to annotations made by Miranda and associated archival materials

Administrative features of the site include: importing and managing platform subscribers, adding sitewide announcements, managing and publishing content, creating and exporting survey results. Each school has the autonomy to create accounts for their teachers, who, in turn, import a list of student participants—automatically generating user accounts on the educational platform. Teachers can download the Alexander Hamilton curriculum, manage assignments, and receive notifications of submissions or missed deadlines.

The Hamilton Education Program is a partnership with Hamilton, The Rockefeller Foundation and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In its original form, the Hamilton Education Program was designed to bolster the learning of American history for more than 160,000 students in close to 2,000 Title 1 schools in 25 cities where the Hamilton musical is performed. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an updated remote learning version of EduHam was made available for free to a broader public, making it easier for schools to gain access.