Hamilton, the Revolution, and "What Comes Next"Master ClassIn-Person
Monday, Mar 16, 2026
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Location To Be Announced
The American Revolution is on center stage, as this year marks the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. America's founding identity, ideals, goals, failures, and accomplishments will all be up for view. This course will explore such things by looking through the eyes of one revolutionary and founder: Alexander Hamilton. Of course, Hamilton is hardly representative of America's founding folk; indeed, there's no one model founder. But given Hamilton's active participation in the Revolution, his many contributions to the writing and ratification of America’s Constitution, his key role in the politics of America's first decade, his extreme views, and the countless controversies that he created by shoving his way into centers of change, Hamilton is an ideal lens for exploring the creation of the first democratic republic in the modern world.
HISTORY, U.S. HISTORY, U.S. GOVERNMENT
Joanne Freeman
Joanne B. Freeman, Class of 1954 Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is a leading scholar of early American politics, political culture, and Alexander Hamilton. She is the author of the prize-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic; and editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings and The Essential Hamilton; playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda consulted her and used her work in writing Hamilton. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, explores physical violence on the floor of Congress before the Civil War. A fellow of the Society of American Historians, Freeman was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. In addition to her other public-minded work, Freeman hosts History Matters, a weekly podcast that decodes the present by looking at the past.