Read on Twitter
If you are seeing Hamilton for the first time on July 3, here are my personal recommendations for scholarly writing on the musical, in roughly chronological order! Paywalls abound, sorry!
Before Hamilton, the musicologist working the most on Lin-Manuel Miranda was Elizabeth Titrington Craft. Her dissertation and her article on the marketing of In the Heights is a great place to start with understanding LMM within the world of Broadway. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/smt/2011/00000005/00000001/art00004;jsessionid=3klg4u5wg1gew.x-ic-live-01
Unsurprisingly, historians did some of the best early writing on the show. I've always loved the entries curated by Juntos, a group blog of early Americanists. https://earlyamericanists.com/tag/hamilton-an-american-musical/
A foundational piece of Hamilton scholarly criticism, and a great place to start, is Lyra Monteiro's [ @intersectionist] "Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton" from 2016. https://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article/38/1/89/90687/Review-Essay-Race-Conscious-Casting-and-the
To self-promote, my own somewhat brief review-essay was one of the early musicological treatments. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cafy-5y26
The journal American Music did a special forum on the musical, based on a SAM panel put together by @KyrieElissa. I'll talk about the five articles individually! https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/39861
Elissa Harbert [ @KyrieElissa] has long worked on musical theater that is "about" history (I cite her dissertation all the time), so she was perfectly positioned to contextualize Hamilton as part of this larger subgenre of Broadway theater. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715969
The aforementioned Elizabeth T. Craft here looked at the interesting phenomenon of conflicting ideological responses to the show, interviewing Republican and Democratic state legislators in Utah who had their own reasons for identifying with it. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715970
Anne Searcy [ @AnneSearcy} is a musicologist who specializes in dance, and I love her article so much for bringing close analytical attention to the crucial choreography of the show. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715971
Loren Kajikawa [ @LorenKajikawa] does the work of putting the much-vaunted rapping into an actual musicological context, as well as situating the show within Obama-era identity politics. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715972
Finally, Justin Williams [ @jwilli7] adds yet more hip-hop context, with a close analytical reading of the show and its follow-up The Hamilton Mixtape with a focus on immigration discourse.
I've been focusing mostly on musicology, but of course theater studies has a lot to say. Shannon Walsh had a shorter early review in 2016. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633900/pdf
Most significant has been Donatella Galella's [ @donagalella] essay on Hamilton's "Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion." It's by far the most sustained and detailed critique from this particular ideological perspective.(which I mostly share!) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theatre-survey/article/being-in-the-room-where-it-happens-hamilton-obama-and-nationalist-neoliberal-multicultural-inclusion/203F76B1800B7398A7E761B103441DB9
And historians are still at it, of course. Claire Potter (by whomst I am mysteriously blocked on twitter!) and Renée Romano did an edited collection that I confess I have not read yet. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/historians_on_hamilton
The Journal of the Early American Republic did a special forum as well in 2017, with contributions by @jbf1755, Andrew Schocket, Heather Nathans, Marvin McAllister, @bencarp, and @andyandnancy . I still need to dig into this one. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/36348
I'm of course missing a lot here, especially as things have expanded in recent years. If you have any further suggestions, please comment away!
