![]() One final fact: on July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton fought a duel with the then US vice-president, Aaron Burr, after a dinner party conversation went awry. He founded the US Mint, the National Coast Guard, the New York Post newspaper (which still exists today), and co-founded the New York Manumission Society, an anti-slavery organisation instrumental in ending the international slave trade. He not only founded the first US central bank (the direct forerunner of the Federal Reserve), but also created the first five securities ever traded on Wall Street. He was appointed the first US Treasury secretary, and created large swathes of the US federal government from scratch: the first budget systems, the first tax systems, the customs service, the first monetary policy. ![]() He wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, the seminal essays that ratified that Constitution.Īlexander Hamilton was instrumental in the writing of the US Constitution. He was one of the chief instigators, signatories and defenders of the American Constitution. In New York, Hamilton became George Washington’s closest aide during the revolutionary war, a military hero, and compressed three years of legal study into nine months (he would become known as the most eloquent advocate at the New York bar). Penniless and orphaned, he was nevertheless so superlatively bright that, after his “wondrous” description of a hurricane was published in a local newspaper, the wealthy residents of his town clubbed together to send him to the US for an education. He was abandoned by his father at 10 and lost his mother at 12. ![]() He was born illegitimate, then an almost insurmountable social disgrace, in or around 1755 in the Caribbean. This tells you something about Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is short and intense and intellectually competitive (no Dan Brown for him) and it also tells you something about Alexander Hamilton, whose life was not the stuff of the average academic doorstopper.Īlexander Hamilton is crucial to the history of the United States of America, yet, despite appearing on the $US10 note, he is (or was, before his eponymous musical) often described as “the forgotten Founding Father”. For some light holiday reading, he took along a 700-page historical biography called Alexander Hamilton. In the American summer of 2008, seven years before the Broadway premiere of his musical juggernaut Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda went to Mexico. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |