How do you write like---

[melannen]

So! Hamilton an American Musical.

As usual I'm a day late and a dollar short, but hey, y'all voted for this one, so you're asking for it.

So first off: the music is AMAZING in every possible way, so smart so catchy so emotionally evocative so clever so culturally important so beautiful, and I could look at pictures of the male cast (in costume or out of it) basically forever, and Lin-Manuel Miranda may literally be too good for this world, and I love what the colorful casting has done to the historical narrative and the way that's been made an integral part of the story through the music and book, and I love the reaction it's gotten and the way it's changing Broadway and people in general's perception of the history. And I legitimately teared up when young Philip tried to show his Dad he was going to be a politician too by rapping for him, I want to live in a world where ability to freestyle is a prereq for political power, we wouldn't be the first country ruled on that basis and there are much worse ways.

Also there needs to be a Doctor/Master vid to 'I'll Be Back'



So my knowledge of Hamilton the musical comes from listening to the soundtrack all the way through once, listening to bits and pieces of it out of order, and following it via Broadway fandom on Tumblr since it was just a twinkle in fandom's eye. So I've seen a lot of gifs and stills and text posts and the cast being unfairly adorable, basically, but haven't actually watched any extensive video, and thus my knowledge of the show is based mostly on the music and the fandom. And the cast being adorable. (Of course I still haven't ever watched Les Mis either, and that hasn't stopped me there.)

So that's caveat #1. Caveat #2 is: I came in with a certain amount of knowledge/opinions about the Federalist/DR thing already. But only a very limited amount. Where I was is actually really well summed up by this Vox article by Matthew Iglesias, which you should read: Cabinet Battle #1," explained.

I cannot make statements on how accurate that is to the history, but yeah, basically: as a U.S. East Coast Liberal, I have watched the historical narrative shift, over my lifetime, from "We should side with Jefferson because he didn't constantly fuck over the poor freemen for his own gain and hey who cares about the blacks anyway eh" to "We should side with Hamilton because at least he wasn't a fucking slaver and hey who cares about the poor anyway eh." This is complicated by the fact that it's still very much a North vs. South regional conflict, with Jefferson for the South and Hamilton for the North, except that I'm a born & bred Marylander so my bred-in opinion on the North vs. South thing is "Fucking arrogant Yankees, fucking delusional Southerners, just fuck 'em all." With special consideration for hating Virginia because it's our river, dammit, yes the ENTIRE THING, and oh right, the deal was that who would cede land for the District? Why is it only coming from our side of the river then...?

If you're not from one of the thirteen colonies you should know that yes, this is all still considered relevant by people today. And Maryland and Virginia still periodically get into fights over who owns the river the same way they did back in the 1790s (spoiler: it's Maryland. But you should still pay for half the bridge ok that's just fair, one end of it is on your side.)

Anyway. To the extent I have independent study knowledge of the period, it's from a class I took in college about reading Maryland womens' diaries from the early 19th century, so while I have Opinions on historical birth control, early letterzines, the homefront effects of the Great Embargo, just how freaking incestuous the upper classes were, and the evils of cheating husbands when a wife is that constrained, I didn't come into the musical with any particularly strong feelings about the Great Men of the period.

Except a vague impression that if you have to be obsessed with one of the the two, Burr was way, way more epic than Hamilton. (This is based mostly on my fondness for the museums of Parkersburg, WV.)

So there's the background. Based on fandom's reaction, I went into Act Two expecting to get totally sold on the Federalist point of view: yes, LMM, rap to me about debt consolidation and banking systems and convince me for at least the length of one musical that the Federalists were good guys and I should cheer them on. My body is ready.

And then... that didn't happen.

Like. The arguments in the Cabinet Battles basically come down to TJ saying "Hey, Hamilton, your 'political policy' is based on making you and your friends rich and consolidating power at everyone else's expense" and A. Ham going "Yeah? Well you're a fucking slaveowner."

Which ADMITTEDLY is a valid burn but doesn't actually do anything to convince me that A. Ham's political policies are any good. Specially since (at least in the soundtrack) we don't see him trying to actually do anything about slavery except burn TJ with it.

And then, the central character conflict is supposed to be Hamilton vs. Burr (TJ is just there to be a strawman bad guy, afaict), where we side with Hamilton because Hamilton has principles and Burr has none. Except that, per the musical at least, the political principles Hamilton has are:

1. Making banks more powerful
2. Making A. Ham and his rich inlaws more powerful even if it means screwing over his own friends
3. Defending the constitution so that the government A. Ham is part of stays powerful

Whereas the political principles Burr has in this musical are:

1. Ok we're trying democracy, so I'm'a get out of the way and let democracy happen.
2. Oh, no, wait, we've decided 'democracy' means 'secret deals in smoky rooms' now? Well fuck that then, you aren't shutting me out.
3. Yes, I am going to run for the Senate against the rich old dude who thinks he's entitled to a seat without even trying, and yes I am enough of a populist to win it, and no, I don't care about your stupid party loyalties, did you actually listen to that speech you wrote for the General?
4. So,,,, you're going to fuck over all of your vaunted political principles, and this entire country, just because you're still peeved at me on a personal level? Fuck you Hamilton you're the worst thing that ever happened to democracy.

...so I guess what I'm saying here is sorry, Lin-Manuel, you totally failed to convince me that Hamilton is more epic than Burr.

Also. To the extent that Hamilton's life journey is the through-line of the show, it's pretty much just selling the narrative that if you're smart enough, and you work hard enough, and you're determined enough, then anyone can be rich and powerful and famous. And that is just such a pernicious storyline? Because no, not everyone can be rich and powerful and famous if they just try hard enough. But it's a storyline that American culture tries really hard to sell people on.

And, fair enough, the people who tell the stories we all follow in droves - people like Lin-Manuel Miranda - did try really hard, and then get rich and famous and powerful (at least, as far as Broadway will get you, in his case) - so it's really easy for our story-makers to buy into that, and gloss over the thousand other things that had to line up for them to get there, and ignore the thousand other people who also tried. It's also fucking pernicious because if you push enough on individual people trying hard and getting rich and powerful, you hamstring the 'if we all work together we can make everyone a little less miserable' narrative, which is one I like 100% better than 'screw everyone else, get rich'. (Not to mention I am at the age where I keep seeing friends fall one by one into severe depression because they've been sold all their lives on that idea and when it comes clear that trying hard isn't enough on its own to become spectacularly successful, their life narrative collapses and they've got nothing left. It's just. Not good, ok.)

There's an argument to be made that fine, that narrative has problems, but it's a foundational narrative of the US, and we still needed a story that gave immigrants a people of color a place in it, which, yes, I guess? But it's not like people haven't been selling immigrants and people of color on it just as hard as anyone else, for as long as the US has existed. That's why we get twelve-year-old boys giving themselves concussion syndrome in football, that's why we get women coming to the US to be supermodels and ending up as slaves. It's a fucking awful narrative to convince people to hang their lives and sacred honor on, and a lot of people in this country do.

So as a social statement it's very much about "we'll support the current power structure, if you just Let Us In" whereas at this point in my life I am more at "this is all super-broken and we need to keep trying to fix it until it's not".

And maybe that was supposed to be part of the point of A Ham's tragic fall, betraying his family and then betraying himself, but. Without you cheering on his quest to be rich and famous and powerful, there's not much left there that I can find? And the duel didn't really work for me as a heroic flaw catharticly bringing him down because the heroic flaw there was 'a deep-down belief that the rules don't apply to me the same way they apply to other people', you just spent a year campaigning to outlaw duels, it's less a tragic flaw at that point than a comic one.

So I'm left with "you must be a great man because Angelica likes you and Eliza married you." Except oh wait, Angelica also liked Jefferson. And you cheated on Eliza. Nvm.

I'd heard a lot about the final song, "Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story", as a triumphant feminist ending that pushes Eliza toward the center, and I loved all her stuff earlier about controlling the narrative, so even as I was less impressed than I wanted to be with Act 2, I was looking forward to that. But then instead of what I was expecting, which was something along the lines of Eliza going full-out a-certain-point-of-view "he went and got himself killed for stupid man reasons so it's my right to finish the narrative he started however the hell I want to", I got, "Oh no, my husband is dead, so I'm going spend the rest of my life honoring his memory because what else is a woman without a husband good for amirite or amirite?"

:/

Anyway.

I REALLY LOVE THE MUSIC. AND I REALLY LOVE THE CAST. And I love that the fandom exists and is writing tons of nobody-dies modern AUs and second-generation shipping. It's so great! And I'm sure my expectations were too high, even if I do firmly believe that if he tried, Lin-Manuel Miranda could write a rap about Hamilton being a dork about accounting that would convince me the Federalists were right.

And I'm probably not going to be in the fandom ever. Unless Burr fandom really gets going. Meanwhile I shall keep writing about Grantaire being drunk on stage during the presidential debate and Toussaint being Valjean's campaign manager.

Possibly if I read Chernow and got more of where the show was coming from, I would have different opinions, but a) reading one entire brick for the sake of a musical fandom is enough for this decade, and b) Les Mis fandom on Tumblr has been posting enough excerpts of Chernow's wrong wrong wrong opinions on the French Revolution that I'm not sure I would trust him on the broad political stripes anyway. I do kinda want to finally read the Federalist Papers now though, so there's that.

Comments

[birke]

Thank you for writing the first critical engagement of the musical that I have seen on social media.

[melannen]

I guess I dropped the f-bomb enough for it to count as critical engagement? Thanks.

[untonuggan]

I have to say that when I first heard about the musical my first reaction was "Wait, Alexander Hamilton is the protagonist? That guy?? Ugh I hated reading his policies in US History class."

(which, not gonna lie, I did not take much US History focused on Founding Fathers once I was in college, so maybe someone would have convinced me otherwise? But. Was instead reading/researching other things, like mostly Ida B Wells and South Africa and colonialism)

anyway, what i'm trying to say is, it's been *awhile* since I critically engaged with Hamilton or the Federalist papers or any of that, but. I enjoy the music/cast/musical, and also hope that fans get on board with things like "Huh, what *do* researchers do about holes in history [like with Burn]?" and other critical questions [like those you mention above].

[melannen]

I love the meta stuff about historiography that got worked in! That was great. I would totally watch a musical that was just about Eliza Hamiltion blazing her way through the historical record. And there is something to be said for how Hamilton got smeared by generations of school history books while Jefferson was lionized, and why that was, and what that said about our country's priorities.

But, I mean, what the recent effort toward rehabilitation of Hamilton says is pretty much, "we need to make people love giant bank bailouts and economic neoliberalism" and. nope. I am not there for that.

And yeah, I could study up on it more, but I could also study Ida B. Wells or Zitkala-Sa instead, so.

[gehayi]

Burr fandom may yet get going, though it already does exist. There are 105 complete stories in English on AO3 with Burr listed as a character. And Miranda has been talking about doing a musical about Burr's life after the famous duel. (For me, the big song is "Wait For It," so I do sympathize with you.)

Anyway, I'm so with you on this. The music is fantastic. The history and the real-life people...not so much. And the ad hominem arguments about Jefferson being a slave owner annoy me--especially since, as you said, Hamilton wasn't doing shit to oppose slavery. Not to mention...Washington (whom Hamilton spent a lot of time working for) was not only a slave owner, too, but a pretty awful one according to Mount Vernon:

Sources offer differing insight into Washington's behavior as a slave owner. On one end of the spectrum, Richard Parkinson, an Englishman who lived near Mount Vernon, once reported that "it was the sense of all his [Washington's] neighbors that he treated [his slaves] with more severity than any other man." Conversely, a foreign visitor traveling in America once recorded that George Washington dealt with his slaves "far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia." What is clear is that Washington frequently utilized harsh punishment against the enslaved population, including whippings and the threat of particularly taxing work assignments. Perhaps most severely, Washington could sell a slave to a buyer in the West Indies, ensuring that the person would never see their family or friends at Mount Vernon again. Washington conducted such sales on several occasions.

:::

Mount Vernon’s enslaved community took opportunities, when possible, to physically escape their enslavement. For example, in April of 1781 during the American Revolution, seventeen members of the Mount Vernon enslaved population—fourteen men and three women—fled to the British warship HMS Savage anchored in the Potomac off the shore of the plantation. In other instances, members of the enslaved community who were directly connected to the Washingtons either attempted to or were successful in their escape plans. These individuals included Washington’s personal assistant Christopher Sheels, whose plan to escape with his fiancée was thwarted, the family cook Hercules and Martha Washington’s personal maid Oney Judge, both of whom escaped successfully.

Yet this never gets addressed in the musical. Washington is, as usual, treated like the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But then instead of what I was expecting, which was something along the lines of Eliza going full-out a-certain-point-of-view "he went and got himself killed for stupid man reasons so it's my right to finish the narrative he started however the hell I want to", I got, "Oh no, my husband is dead, so I'm going spend the rest of my life honoring his memory because what else is a woman without a husband good for amirite or amirite?"

There's actually a hell of a lot more to Eliza than the musical shows. She and the kids were left dead broke when Hamilton died; he was heavily in debt, as a matter of fact, and those debts had to be paid out of the non-existent estate. She wouldn't even get his army pension until thirty-three years later, and that required a special act of Congress. And then her father died four months after Hamilton died. (Which helped, because he left her some money, but the emotional toll must have been huge.) I can just picture Eliza wanting to fire 1804, because that was an awful year for her.

But in addition to polishing Alex's reputation and preserving his papers and letters, guess how she spent her widowhood?

Even though Elizabeth spent her widowhood in poverty, she was active in charitable organizations. She held positions in the New York Orphan Asylum Society and founded orphanages in New York City and Washington, D.C. She was known to take homeless children into her own home.

PBS goes further, saying that she founded New York's first private orphanage in 1806. Graham-Windham.org has this to say about the woman who founded one of the orphan societies that eventually merged to form Graham-Windham:

Less than two years after her husband’s death, on March 15th, 1806, Elizabeth and a small group of women had gathered to form the Orphan Asylum Society to care for children who were orphaned from epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. Their mission was clear, “To help the afflicted and the needy others have forgotten; to provide them with the education and training they need to become productive, contributing members of society: to help them realize their capacity for happiness and success which belongs to all
human beings.…” On May 1, 1806 they opened the doors of the Society’s first home, a rented two-story frame house on Raisin Street. Twelve orphans were admitted in the first six months and by the end of the year, 200 orphaned children had been admitted... and the rest, as they say, is history!

There was more to Eliza than merely "preserver of Hamilton's memory." I do feel that Miranda could have, y'know, MENTIONED that in the final song.

[melannen]

Yeah, he turns up, but I keep hitting the perennial AO3 problem where he's either a background villain character or he's there mostly to moon over Hamilton. Perhaps I will have to delve deeper!

I know ... more of the actual history than I expected to, since my entry point is Les Mis fans, i.e. the place where history geekery and musical theater geekery hits critical mass, and I totally get that there's only so much complexity you can fit in one play, no matter how dense it is. But that leaves me judging it based on what's actually in the play, and.. yeah.

I understand that Laurens, during the war, actually did do a lot of really active anti-slavery pro-racial-equality stuff, and Hamilton supported him in it, but from the musical you could easily fail to notice that Laurens existed. :/

..It's really hard to judge "relative severity" of a slaveowner, especially on a large plantation, because it didn't really matter how "nice" he was, they were still chattel slaves, so they still mostly hated their owners, so there still had to be punishments to keep them in line, and they would still run if they could. In that college class I mentioned, one of the diaries I read was actually by someone who was enslaved on a plantation near DC. And they were living pretty well actually? Illegally taught to read and write by their owners, their own house with carpets and featherbeds and china, being given enough pay to save up for freedom, promoted to management, their family relationship with the plantation owners pretty openly acknowledged... this was in the period before cotton became king, when a lot of people thought slavery in the US would just naturally die out on its own. But when money ran out the oldest daughter still got sold away, because there were debts, and then the whole family ran. Taking their savings and china service and diaries with them. Because fuck slavery even if it comes with nice china.

Anyway.

I know Eliza was awesome in her own right (I didn't realize he left her in poverty though! Wow dude, even more of a dick than I realized). And the orphan asylum even gets mentioned in the song! Just. Somehow Alexander gets the credit for it despite being dead. Because it couldn't have been something a woman did for herself. (And obviously Eliza's motivations and her relationship with her husband's memory would have been really complicated but the musical simplified them the wrong way.)

[isis]

And the ad hominem arguments about Jefferson being a slave owner annoy me--especially since, as you said, Hamilton wasn't doing shit to oppose slavery.

Well, he was one of the founding members of the New York Manumission Society, according to Chernow. Though Philip Schuyler held slaves, and Hamilton didn't argue with his father-in-law...

[highlander_ii]

Every time I hear anything from/about Hamilton, all I can see is LMM as Alvie from House: https://vimeo.com/9728372 (That's just the end, he's in the whole 2-part episode - 06x01-02)

[melannen]

He turns up in all sorts of unexpected places! Finding out he was doing cantina music for the new Star Wars was the first thing that got me genuinely excited rather than just cautiously optimistic. (...no spoilers)

[lotesse]

... THANK YOU FOR THIS LINK

[muccamukk]

Soooooo... what are your feelings on the collected works of Horatio Alger? :D

Super interesting post. I've sort of been watching this whole thing with mild bafflement, but haven't been seeing that much discussion about historicity. Possibly because I've blocked it on tumblr, which seems to be where people are.

[melannen]

Have not read, do not plan to read, also possibly was a pedophile apparently hmm, have a small collection of socialist utopias from the same period that I may get around to reading some day. :P

I have not a great historical grounding in this stuff but I guess it's still better than a lot of teenagers on Tumblr? It turns out I certainly have strong feelings anyway though.

[lotesse]

I've been dealing with the Hamilton Bank Problem in my head the same way I deal with the problem of consumption in hip-hop music in general: in a specific cultural context, it's maybe sort of okay. Hiphop so often involves long lists of luxury goods, dollar amounts, an almost crass level of valuation of financial success. Contextualized against Black American history, in which slaves not only had no possessions but were themselves literal commodities - okay, I can see why "Black people have purchasing power now" is a thing to say, and as a result I'll put up with a lot more capitalism than I would with white commodity culture.

Ofc the problem with Hamilton is that he was not, in fact, nonwhite. So while in-text I can deal, in terms of actual political history I think you've really got the right end of the stick

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean, the musical does really work in the context of hip-hop culture?

...of course the hip-hop I listen to tends to be way more of the "We're poor as fuck but we can all stand together and bring down The Man" variety than the "Look at all my cars and hos" kind - and both strains have coexisted for the entire history of hip-hop as a genre. Sometimes in the same song. As they do in Hamilton too. The fact that most people think of the gold chains and leopardskin when they think of hip-hop instead of the socially activist stuff is down to, y'know, racism and capitalism. As usual.

/says the person whose knowledge of old-school East Coast hip-hop mostly comes from once spending a week at social justice boot camp in the same group as Paradise the Architect

[recessional]

I've hit oversaturation with it to the point where I wouldn't listen to it anyway. (I'm contrary like that; it's actually a problem.)

But I'm also still over here in my corner waving my "descended from United Empire Loyalists" flag, where "Loyalist" often actually meant "did not side with the Revolutionaries hard enough", so there's also the angles of "in terms of real political history all of this stuff included terrorizing people, murdering some of them, assaulting many others, and running them out of their homes, and then illegally repossessing aka stealing their homes and goods for personal financial gain."

Sooo yeah.

[melannen]

I'm descended from a long line of "Don't care, you politicians and powerful folks will screw us over either way, and war just means ruined harvests and dead kids, give us whatever loyalty oaths or whatever and we'll sign them" smallfarmers, far as I can tell. They seem to have endured through both the Revolution and the Civil War on that basis with nobody serving in any army. I find that a valid strategy. (...and possibly also some Hessians, but that's poorly documented.)

The music is really good though if you like that sort of thing!

[untonuggan]

OK you have hit one of my major pet peeves with period dramas. I find it extremely suspect that *only* the soldiers in the red jackets would rape, pillage, burn, loot and whatnot but the other soldiers are *magically* virtuous because they have Divine Destiny or something on their side.

so I side-eye a lot of US Manifest Destiny films super hard, because it seems like a lot of protagonist origin stories are "that redcoat that was quartered in our house did unspeakable things to my wife, and then they took my land and sowed the fields with salt [which is also equated with my wife, a possession], and now I will go fight a Just War which is clearly not at all like me being a freedom fighter/guerilla warrior/Contra/terrorist/any of those other people we bomb all the time now and also not at all like what I did to the people who were just living on this land that I took it from because it was my destiny."

[stellar_dust]

Is there a good place to stream the soundtrack? Did all of tumblr download it from a pirate dropbox or something?

[untonuggan]

it's on Youtube. Just no visuals. Last I checked.

[melannen]

It was available to stream free via NPR for a couple weeks, which is when fandom-in-general fell in love, but that came down when the for-pay itunes album went up. (One thing about LMM, he really understands new-media marketing.)

I missed the NPR window and listened to most of it on Spotify streaming, where it is still free, at least if you have Spotify. IDK if any other legal streaming services have it? I'm sure there are pirate dropbox versions but I can't point you to it.

And yeah, I think most of it's on youtube.

[isis]

It's free to stream if you've got Amazon Prime.

[skygiants]

I love the musical to bits and pieces, but ha, yeah, Act 2 fails to convince me re: most of Hamilton's policies in most of any way. (Federalists vs. Democratic Republicans, do I have to pick, BOTH OF THEM WERE BAD???) I did not expect Burr to be my main point of entry into the show, but ... he kind of is.

[melannen]

I didn't want to be in it for Burr, because historically he's if anything more of an ass than Hamilton, but he is pretty epic, and in the musical I am with him basically right up until the point when he pulls the trigger.

[beatrice_otter]

Yes to all of this. Look, if you're looking for a hero among the Founding Fathers ... you're going to be awfully disappointed. Were they Great Men? Yes. Did they do some awesome stuff? Yes. But they were Great Men of their time, which means huge helpings of racism, classism, sexism .... Some of them are far better than others, and "better" depends on what criteria you judge by (less racist? less classist? less sexist?). But that doesn't mean you can just uncritically take even the better ones and idolize them.

[melannen]

I mean, to be fair, it's not even just that they were Men Of Their Time, it's that they were Real Actual Human Beings, and unfortunately, as you know, people, so any human being put on that kind of pedestal is going to fail in one way or another. (This is why I try to avoid getting invested in RPF fandoms anymore....) Especially if they're the sort of people who voluntarily go into politics.

And I'm willing to accept that we can have fictionalized versions that were better than the real, but then the fictional canon has to do its own work to establish that, and this musical just. Didn't.

[strikeslip]

Actually, you can take the "a storyline that American culture tries really hard to sell people on" bit a step farther-- it's not just that Hamilton is an American Dream narrative, it's also that Hamilton is a /broadway/ narrative. Broadway, specifically that street in New York City. And part of being a broadway musical is selling New York City, so of course Hamilton is the hero. He undeniably had a big part in making NYC what it was. That line in The Room Where it Happens, where he says "cuz we've got the banks" is pretty much the climax of the whole musical for me.

Broadway musicals are a big tourist attraction, so the push to glorify NYC is not a coincidence at all. It's something the target audience (tourists) are already interested in, and it drives them to spend more money and come back more often. There's a reason so many of those musicals are set in / about their home city and it's that same reason that Hamilton is the hero. Not just a narrative about coming to the USA-- it's about coming to NYC specifically. Aren't we the best city? Aren't we glorious? Here's our song and dance!

(Hi, came for the Imperial Radch thoughts, stayed for the 'finally someone who agrees with me that Burr Fandom should be the thing'.)

[melannen]

I would buy that! And since my recent entry point to musical theater fandom has been via European musicals, it makes sense that I missed that point. "New York, New York" and all that. (Have you seen the hilarious tumblr post going around where Hamilton's New York Post is still, late 2015, randomly slagging off Aaron Burr for not doing enough for NYC?)

And it's not just an American Narrative or an NYC narrative, it's an Immigrant Comes To NYC narrative, which, I get is actually super-important, especially for the people who were still living it, and I'm not one of those people, and some of the older LMM interviews I've seen about In The Heights are really interesting about that aspect of the stories he tells, but. IDK. It's still a narrative that I don't like seeing uncritically out there, and I don't feel like Hamilton was particularly critical of it. (I have to say, one thing about this whole discussion, it's making me really want to get around to listening to In The Heights. And Allegiance.)

[yhlee]

Here by way of thistleingrey. This is super-interesting and thoughtful. I had the world's worst AP US History class (I went to a...dubious private school in South Korea, and as luck of the draw would have it, my teacher was terrible) so even if I remembered stuff from HS it's all very blurry. I love the musical musically, but not only do I not know much about the historicity, I also spent the other half of my childhood in Texas so all the 13 Colonies stuff is kind of opaque to me. (Yeah, I had Texas History in 7th grade. Brilliant teacher, but...somewhat useless topic?) Thanks for giving me things to think about.