Summer is here. Looking for summer reading and inspiration on where to travel? How about flying to New York, Chicago, or San Francisco to see the smash hit musicalHamilton before the start of the London production in November and the second leg of the U.S. Tour next year?

The musicalHamiltonis a story of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), an immigrant from the West Indies who became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War and was the new nation’s first Treasury Secretary. The book, music and lyrics were written by incredibly talented playwright and musician, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and it features a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B, and Broadway. Hamilton and other white historical figures are deliberately portrayed by actors of colour to make the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience, as the story of American then, told by America now. Since it opened in New York in 2015, it became one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever, winning 11 Tony’s including the Best Musical, Grammy’s and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2016.

Many people probably thought of Hamilton as the face of the U.S. $10 bill before the show became so popular. Hamilton was indeed the main author of the economic policies of the George Washington administration, but that is not his only legacy. Ultimately, the United States that we know today is a nation built upon the foundation of Hamilton’s ideas. He helped achieve ratification by writing 51 of the 85 installments of The Federalist Papers, to which James Madison (eventually became the fourth President) and John Jay (the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) contributed, a text considered by some as the best expression of democratic political theory ever written. In the introduction of The Federalist Papers from Oxford World’s Classics, Lawrence Goldman explains the historical background leading up to the drafting of the Constitution, analyses the psychological and philosophical premises of the authors, and places them in the history of western political thought.