Stephen Kent in the Washington Examiner on the political power of Hamilton

Hamilton isn’t 'history,' but it offers a better way to talk about it with millennials than debating statues

This Independence Day weekend was a weird one for most people. Cities across the country canceled their firework shows and parades out of fear of the coronavirus. Protests that characterized most of June raged on into the holiday weekend, during which Baltimore saw the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue. A statue of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was downed in Rochester, New York, reminding us once again that the churning of grievance on the Left against monuments is more of an unfocused tantrum than a calculated statement about our nation’s complicated origin story.

We’ve always been a country at war with our own history, but this weekend that war felt high pitched. Enter stage left: Hamilton, the smash-hit Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda that really took the country by storm in 2015. Filmed for the big screen but released exclusively to Disney+ on July 3 because of COVID-19, Hamilton could not have come to us at a better time.

We need to talk about our history, its contradictions, aspirations, and consequences, all of it. Hamilton opens the door for intergenerational discussion that dignifying, shrieking millennials vandalizing statues simply do not.

Read the rest in the WASHINGTON EXAMINER