Web Review EssayAlexander Hamilton: Traditional History in a Non-Traditional MediaColumnist George Wills appropriately described Alexander Hamilton’s legacy when he wrote, “We [Americans] honor Jefferson, but we live in Hamilton’s country.”1 Involved in the Revolutionary War, Continental Congress, and Washington’s cabinet, Alexander Hamilton indeed shaped American economics and politics. However, complex and contradictory he remains an enigma in American history. Historians of Hamilton quickly become painfully aware of the countless intersecting stories surrounding his life, creating a confusing view of this influential founding father. As Janet Murray has noted, “To be alive in the twentieth century is to be aware of … the limitless intersecting stories of the actual world.”2 Salvation from this mesh of details and contradictions may be staring the historian in the face in the form of new media. The ability to hyperlink texts, websites, and sources, provides the historian with a diversity of tools for portraying the complexities of human life in an age foreign to the modern world. This is Murray’s answer, “to capture such a constantly bifurcating plotline...one ...need[s] more than a thick labyrinthine novel or a sequence of films. To capture such cascading permutations, one... need[s] a computer.”3 With this bright possibility in mind, how has the World Wide Web been utilized to portray fuller descriptions of historic individuals? What advantages emerge by doing history on the web? Most importantly, as Alexander Hamilton represents “traditional” history, how have traditional historical subjects been treated within this non-traditional media of the web? Alexander Hamilton on the WebWell titled, this site is indeed an introduction to Hamilton on the web. Links, links, and more links organized under such headings as biography, images, and writings, make this more database than narrative. Lev Manovich’s description of the database well describes this site, “May new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning, middle, or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other.”4 Geared towards the web surfer, links lead to an array of sites ranging from the scholarly to the popular. Though the site claims to hold over 150 links, not all of them work, and many return to the same web sites time and again. While the site makes excellent use of hypertext and provides clear navigation, discretion is needed as archives from the Library of Congress and The Founder's Constitution (a website devoted to archiving the original writings of the founding era) are next to those leading to personal websites on Hamilton. Most of the books webmaster, Tim Spalding, recommends fall within the popular history realm as opposed to the scholarly. As can often be the case with Hamilton, his duel with Aaron Burr consumes much of the space in the recommended book section. Overall, Alexander Hamilton on the Web represents both the strengths of new media in its ability to link diverse sources together, with its weaknesses, lack of narrative and strong content. A Biography of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)An on-line book, this site represents part of a larger American history website created by the Department for Computing and the Humanities at The University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Envisioned to familiarize students of American Studies with web creation, the project includes a large number of articles covering topics from American presidents to influential figures and events created by the students themselves. The biographies supplied with each subject reveal careful research. Written and organized as a “book,” the forty-two “chapter” work on Hamilton contains few images and few hyperlinks. A political history that traces his rise to power within the context of America’s struggle to gain and then retain its independence, it moves forward in a strong linear narrative. Interestingly, there are no footnotes or attributions within the text, only a bibliography at the end. Fairly self-contained, the site does lacks many links to other Hamilton web sites. Lacking vision, the work does not harness the power of new media or seek to expand history’s representation through technological innovation. Another site similar to this one is Ian Finseth's The Rise and Fall of Hamilton. Part of the University of Virginia's voluminous network of sites, this work presents good scholarship with no technological innovation. While more scholarly than Spalding’s site and so stronger in the realm of content, these books on line lack an imaginative use of the new technology that web history affords. The American ExperienceOrganized around the Burr-Hamilton duel that took Hamilton’s life in 1804, this site contains short descriptions of issues relating to the duel itself, the rules that governed duels in early America, and background on each man involved. Designed to compliment the documentary that PBS issued on the Burr-Hamilton duel, it provides a time-line of events in each man’s life, maps, a teacher’s guide, and actual transcriptions from the film.
Along the lines of popular histories on-line, Hamilton Lives is another website, which aims to appeal to history-lovers and those interested in educational entertainment. Hal Bidlack, Deputy Director of the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies, impersonates Hamilton for school groups, parties, and civic events. His website provides a short timeline, some images, and an excellent annotated bibliography of Hamilton sources. Together these two sites reveal the continuing interest of the public in Hamilton. Yet, rather than harnessing the unique tools of new technology, both sites utilize it as a springboard for more traditional methods—video and dramatic interpretations. Once again the tools of the web are used only superficially and history remains grounded in traditional methods. Alexander Hamilton and The Founder's ConstitutionOne of the benefits of the web has been the digitization of primary sources. When it comes to original documents relating to Hamilton, one need not worry. Through The Founders Constitution, American Memory, and NARA, Hamilton’s voice is heard. Most easily accessed are the Federalist Papers found in complete form on quite a few web sites.
The Founder’s Constitution, though not solely about Hamilton, follows the story of the creation of the Constitution through primary documents supplemented with insights from the authors.“An anthology of reasons and of the political arguments that thoughtful men and women drew from, and used to support, those reasons,”5 this work was originally published in book form by the University of Chicago Press. This project harnesses many of the powers of web technology. Organized in a linear fashion, the works are also interconnected and not reliant upon a specific narrative. This allows readers to work through the site based upon their own research interests. While most of the examples to this point have focused upon either the database model of links or the narrative model of text, The Founder’s Constitution presents a better balance. While still missing images and auditory elements, it harnesses the power of non-linearity, hypertexting, and manipultive usage that distinguishes it from a traditional textual source.
So who is Alexander Hamilton on the web? What is history in new media in comparison with history through books and how has it changed both historical presentation and reception for the good and the bad? With the possibilities for hyperlinking, multisensory formatting, and wider dissemination, web history should excite and attract historians. Opportunities abound for greater interaction and connection between historian and history-lover. Hamilton’s life, which began on a small island of the British West Indies and ended along the New Jersey coastline, not only spanned a tumultuous time period, it also followed many divergent trails. The ability to pursue these theme--to have historians submit small essays examining various aspects of Hamilton’s world, for example--would certainly be much easier to integrate on a web-site than in a book. As well, the ability to connect secondary interpretations with primary sources enables student and connoisseur alike to read Hamilton’s own words—always a beneficial plus when discussing historical interpretation. Moving history into digital space allows historians to deal with a complex man, such as Hamilton, in a non-overwhelming manner. However, as with many new technologies at their birth, the newness and complexity of web creation has thus far kept historians from venturing out of traditional textual/ “bookish” approaches. As well, digital media does have its negatives. In reading through both scholarly and more public histories of Hamilton, one realizes the strength and authority of words on paper, as opposed to on a screen.
Further, most web usage to this point is purely skimming. Scholarly works that seek to engage the web surfer in detailed arguments are likely to lose their audience. Technology’s future holds hope for remedying the uncomfortableness of reading on-line, but as of yet, this is not reality. When all is said and done, most academics will still return to their books, because they are the “tried and true method.” Until web histories begin presenting history in such an appealing, scholarly, and engaging way that cannot be resisted, books will win out in the classroom and study. And if websites on Alexander Hamilton are any barometer, his web histories leave much to be desired. If academic histories are lacking impetus on the web, what about popular ones? Can the public satisfy their historical interests on-line, or do books still retain pre-eminence? Richard Brookhiser’s Alexander Hamilton, American (New York: 1999), represents a strong narrative written for the public. Eminently enjoyable and an easy read, websites which present text only with a few images here and there lack the engagement that Brookhiser achieves in his first chapter. There is a strange similarity between Hamilton and Burr’s duel and one that is beginning to emerge between narrative and database on the web. Because of its mathematical origins, the computer naturally lends itself to categorization in databases. However, these databases tend to overwhelm any forms of narratives, as linearity becomes hard to ensure. Because this duel still continues, and both forms remain at odds, history on the web still carries a tenuous existence. While most
of the Hamilton sites on the web are fairly positive portrayals of the
founding father (unlike much of the popular and academic treatment he
has received in the traditional publishing world) Hamilton’s portrayal
is uniformly from a political perspective. Set within the paradigm that
follows the story of the “self-made man,” Hamilton’s
image does not expand with the media. Interestingly, Hamilton represents
a traditional subject expressed in a traditional method, even in non-traditional
new media. While new media holds great possibilities for expressing the
complexities of the past in an intriguing way, it awaits a Hamiltonian-like
figure to so deftly wed the two together. 1 Stephen Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 6. 2 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 37. 3 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 37. 4 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Boston: MIT Press, 2002), 218. 5 Philip B. Kurkland and Ralph Lerner, ed, The Founder’s Constitution, “Introduction,” http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/introduction.html.
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