The American Revolution Is Not Complete

It was telling that the last pop culture sensation to tackle the American Revolution—the 2015 musical Hamilton—felt that the best way to make the nation’s founding legible to modern audiences was to cast a Founding Father as a plucky immigrant. So distant was their world from ours that its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, seemed to think that audiences could only relate to the founding if it was retrofitted into more contemporary terms. For all the absurdities of that musical and that moment—a quasi...