As a certified History Nerd, I'm beside myself with glee that a former number one Broadway hit is about one of our nation's founding fathers. But here's the thing: it's not anyone most people remember from grade school history class. Not Washington. Not Jefferson. Not Lincoln (and how many of you would have stopped me there, because you know Lincoln was great but doesn't qualify as a Founding Father?). Let's face it: between teaching-to-the-test public education policy and fading Baby Boomer memory, who of us can be expected to remember that stuff anyway (if in fact we ever knew it to begin with)? So this is why I'm so amazed at this phenomenon: A show about someone hardly anyone remembers is killing it on Broadway. Alexander Hamilton never made it to the top job (President). Sure, he's on the money, but I think they just threw him that bone for being the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury.
Let's digress for a moment: Hamilton is currently on the $10 bill, which is nicknamed a 'sawbuck'. I say currently, because he's also been on the $2 (yes, we still have one and they're so fun - go get some next time you're at the bank), the $5, the $20, the $50, and the $1000. It tells you something about me that I love the cute little $2 bill, but I didn't even know we had a $1000. That's what I get for not going 
into the drug dealing biz. Hamilton's time on the $10 may also be numbered - there's talk of kicking him off it in favor of a woman. Back to the sawbuck: It's called that for a somewhat convoluted reason, but interesting nonetheless. Sawbuck is from the Dutch word for the common construction tool often called a sawhorse. The early models were more X shaped. That way, they could easily be used for sawing up logs. And of course X being the Roman numeral for 10, if 'sawbuck' = X and X = 10, therefore 'sawbuck' = 10. And there's the extent of my high school algebra (and Latin!) knowledge.
Hamilton is not the only pop culture history juggernaut. Turn is a recent television series featuring George Washington's Revolutionary War spy network. Mercy Street is about volunteer nurses during the Civil War. Texas Rising, about a few pivotal days during the Texas Revolution, aired with success. Underground, Vikings, Spartacus, The Last Kingdom, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, even Drunk History are earning millions of views from across a very broad demographic. So let this be a (history) lesson for all of us writers: there's plenty of material out there, and we don't even have to make anything up. As someone once said, this stuff writes itself.
This post originally appeared during the 2016 A to Z Blog Challenge.
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