By: Max Jarck

If you have spent anytime around me you probably know that I love The Beatles. They are easily my favorite musical act ever and I have read an almost embarrassing amount about them. So to see the song ‘You’ll Be Back’ compared to The Beatles excited me. But before I even saw/heard this comparison I liked the song enough to save it on my phone. For me that’s more than a coincidence; it seems like evidence that it actually does contain elements of The Beatles in it.

The one Beatles song that seems most like ‘You’ll Be Back’ is probably ‘Penny Lane’. The basslines seem very similar as is the tempo and beat of both songs. To me the overall aesthetic of the songs is similar.

‘You’ll Be Back’  would be considered baroque pop and The Beatles had many songs in this style. The Harpsichord in ‘You’ll Be Back’ is very baroque and while the harpsichord never appears in a Beatles song the sped-up piano in “In My Life” has a similar sound. There is an electric guitar part in the third chorus which sounds just like the prominent guitar in ‘Getting Better’ from the masterpiece album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.

A song that sounds like combination 60s hits seems out of place in a soundtrack dominated by hip hop. This is where I was blown away by the thought put into this play. ‘You’ll Be Back’ sounds like an older song because the King is stuck in the past while the revolutionary colonists are singing in the much cooler and newer hip hop style. The difference in styles adds more depth and meaning to the play by showing the contrast between the two groups. I can’t remember if we talked about this in lecture but this idea has stuck with me as a really neat feature of the play.

By: Avery Showell

I want to take the time to acknowledge and talk about the connection between Hamilton and the white-washed society we live in today. Material for generations has been molded to fit the norms of the world today,  which is controlled by the white man and depresses the growth and evolution of Black people as a whole. So most evidently, literature will be funneled the same way ideas are. They do not want you to know too much, but tell you enough for you to feel educated on certain topics. This is where the educators who teach material about this touchy topic come in. One can try and make it as not “white washed” as they think to reach students, but how real can you really make the connections between the white washed culture Hamilton tries to expose and black students who experience being in the society the most if the instructor is not Black his/her self. Therefore, there are certain terms and names that a white person simply can not use, for example the term “Black or Brown People” and entitling us to an income bracket for lack of interest in a certain area of Art.

Alexander Hamilton written by Lin-Manuel Miranda displays a great value of the hip hop culture and how it can move, inspire, and generate new ideas in people and generations. Miranda shows how Black people are a corner stone in history even though the society we live in tries to give us a cap on how successful we can be as a race. The simple theme of hip hop or the use of, shows what is actually an avenue to reach other groups and audiences to often story-tell, rhyme, and release the demons of the challenges Black people face, and have dealt with, for many centuries and continuously to this day.    

I can relate to Hamilton’s story because in the life that we live in today, your life is what you make it. There is so many people in this world laying around saying “I wish I could’ve did this”, or “I wish I could’ve did that” and their life ends up going down the drain and its sad honestly. Hamilton is a well known important figure of his time because he provided change and he has the rags to riches type story that everyone finds so interesting. Personally, I have lot of respect for him on what I’ve learned and I couldn’t relate to a better story on how I want to be able to come up in my life as well. However, There are some things that I don’t agree with and some things I find quite ironic. For instance, I don’t feel as though the play should involve African American actors. I really don’t want to get too much in detail I just don’t agree with it. From a minority standpoint, it’s just not understandable but the play itself is rather interesting.

Although I gained the message of what the play gives off and also the way in which it’s presented, I don quite think I could use the “introduction to hip hop” word usage because its not hip hop. As I learned more and more information I shied away from that idea pretty fast. I’m eager to find out more things as class goes on. I have a pretty good idea of where I’m at in my knowledge of Hamilton, but I know there is a lot room for me to learn and improve upon. Hamilton so far is a great play and it can rub off on someone to want to make a change in their lives and I’m all for it. On the other hand the “hip hop” creation credit and black actors is a no go.

Hamilton And Burr Duel correspondences

          For this annotation project I learned many new things. One of the many things I learned was that you can’t just try and read the articles that you will have to have peer reviews or experts that break down the meaning of the letters, so when I discovered this it gave me a deeper look to the letters and not only did it do that but it also help me to understand the letters more and understand the conflict that these two had with each other. As I went through the different topics the duel between Hamilton and burr were one of the most eye openers to me. As we watched the music videos of Hamilton pass life and learning more about him, was the cause of me picking this documents. Another reason I chose the Hamilton and burr documents because they were the documents that led to Hamilton death. This was very interesting to me because Hamilton seemed like a very interesting person that didn’t bother anybody so I wanted to know why he was killed.

While gaining the knowledge from the letters as I have been reading I take notes of every key thing Hamilton or Burr write that can help me lead to the reason he was murdered. In order to do that I will look at every letter closely and have an open minded and try to think as much as the characters as possible to understand the two difference.  The letters were not only a good source for the case they were also a good source for people that didn’t know much about Hamilton or bur mood to each other and you can see how each of them felt about each other. That is the only progress I have made so far with this project and im excited to understand and learn more as I continue to work on this project.

For my research project, I decided to use the letters between Burr and Hamilton in order to gain insight about events leading to their duel. The authors of this document are both Burr and Hamilton. This source was published in the public domain, as copyright rules were not available at that time. I personally accessed these articles on the Wikisource website.

I was interested in this source because it provides a direct glimpse at the toxic relationship between Burr and Hamilton. What I found difficult in this assignment was to match the context of the letters to actual historical events that Burr and Hamilton were involved in at that time. Getting a historical connotation of the two characters will give me more insight into the letters and the motivation of each person to send the letter. There is also a lot of haziness about the Burr-Hamilton duel. Scholars are unsure about how exactly Hamilton died in the duel with Burr. The causes and events leading up to the duel are also obscure and thus it is important to consider this particular resource for historical research. It may prove useful to find newspapers during this time period in order to learn about the political and economic environment that these two men lived in. I also plan on researching the families of both men to better grasp the conflict and see how deeply it is rooted. Hamilton and Burr are both very complex men who had multiple encounters and so this duel is rooted in many different layers of conflict. Deciphering these layers and learning more about each character and his motivation for the duel will prove to be challenging, but I plan on keeping detailed notes and analyses about each character. Furthermore, I will create webs and timelines in order to keep track of the progression of the fight.

Hamilton–Burr duel correspondences

By: Avery Showell

The historical annotation project has been a process and ongoing process. There have been areas where you learn new things about research in general. Most evidently when using different resources to gather information you will be introduced to new material and techniques. Finding new sources and reliable authors have upsides and down sides. One upside being there are many sources and writers with the credentials to be considered reliable, but there is also a downside to where most sources you find will not be as useful as you may think or even be helpful at all.

For my research I chose the historical document I used the Hamilton-Burr Correspondences. These letters are written and conversed by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. This document was published in 1804 and you can find it many places on the internet. When approaching the research to this topic I try to stay as open minded as I can and accept the historical legacy that I am researching. The document seemed like the most intriguing to me to have such a direct document to read. Letters of the past are more like the text messages of today and when you think of it like that and relate it to your present day life you find appreciation for historical context. The conversations through letters are the most important in whole. Simply because it is documented and can be examined for deeper meaning.

To understand the document you need research that includes insight from other peer sources and experts. There are many experts that have diagnosed the document before and they offer many insights to the text broken down. There are challenges with anything, so the challenges that have arose with this assignment is mostly time management and and structure. A simple solution that I have found to this problem is time management schedules for each class and assignments. So then I can see what I need to do and know how much work I have to complete on each assignment.

In this blog I will be disusing the historical document that I chose and why I felt that it’s importance Is vital in learning more about the different foundations of historical writings. Moreover, I chose President Washington’s Farewell Address. I chose this because for one it has to do with what was our then president and this moment in history was pivotal in creating the future of America as we know it today. What Washington did in the year of 1776 was revolutionize presidency forever in a way the most Americans would agree on. As Washington’s second term in office came to an end he was afraid of the fact that if he were to die while in office many Americans would think presidency was a lifetime deal. That idea was destroyed as he stepped down from office and came up with his two term theory. This theory was then developed into an Amendment and was followed upon by every single president that came after Washington. Personally, the research hasn’t been too much of a stress load for me. I’m a big fan of history so I feel rather confident in observing and taking in new facts/information that would help me in my annotation project. Research for this document is not hard to find for the most part, but you will have your challenges because everyday different things might take you in another direction which is difficult but nothing we all cant handle. By this being a such a popular moment in history there is so many different facts and things you can annotate on that its to a point where you have to pick a specific direction you want to go in and follow that direction. In closing, I find this project rather interesting and I cant wait to see myself improve in the stages of creating this annotation project!

“Immigrants we get the job done”

The Broadway musical Hamilton is a very unique piece, it is the story of Alexander Hamilton a founding father of the United States and is played by a cast of almost all people of color. However, the most interesting thing about the work is how the creator Lin Manuel Miranda relates Alexander Hamilton to himself and many people of color. In the play he shows Hamilton’s poor upbringing, growing up without a father, and his mother died at an early age. He didn’t come from a privileged home like many of his counterparts, he picked himself up from the bootstraps to rise to success.
One major emphasis that Lin Manuel puts on Hamilton to emphasize the relation to many people of color through showing that Hamilton was an immigrant. In a song from the musical, “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”, one of the most notable lines from the entire play is “Immigrants we get the job done”. In this line, he references that historically immigrants have played a major role in the development and prosperity of the country, that the country is made of immigrants. Furthermore, I believe the meaning is meant to take a position on the rhetoric related to immigrants and make a claim that immigrants today are essential to the rise of this country and have been historically. The fact is, Hamilton was also an immigrant who came to America where he was given an opportunity to leave poverty and make a name, it led him to help defeat British forces in the Revolutionary War and serve on the cabinet of George Washington.
This was something I found intriguing because my family is made of immigrants and in society today immigrants and given a bad rep. It shouldn’t be this way, this connotation of immigrants is backward when compared to immigration around our country’s founding. I feel proud when hearing “ we get the job done” as do many others who can relate.