A Revolutionary Idea: Planning an Epic Hamil-Con

Abstract

If you’ve lived under a rock for the past year or two, you probably haven’t heard the catchy, rappy tunes from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway blockbuster Hamilton. But you didn’t have to live in New York to catch Revolutionary fever—it seems those infectious tunes about Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries were everywhere—and no age was immune. Even though the lyrics had some sass, even elementary school kids were learning their history in a novel way and singing along.

Why not capitalize on that success at a library? That was exactly what several of us librarians at Brown County Library—all the way in Northeastern Wisconsin, far from the throngs of Broadway—thought. So in late 2016 we began planning what we hoped would be our epic Hamil-Con.