Is Hamilton academical?
QUESTION How historically accurate is the Broadway hit musical Hamilton? IN 1804, US vice president Aaron Burr fought a duel with the country’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), the man responsible for shaping the US Constitution and establishing the American economic system.
Hamilton was mortally wounded and, in the main, relegated to historical obscurity compared with George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
That was until Hamilton hit Broadway. The show was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda and based on the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
The show incorporates hip-hop, rhythm and blues, pop music, soul music, and traditional show tunes. The most striking inaccuracy is the decision to cast non-white actors as the Founding Fathers. Hamilton is played by a mixedrace actor, and ethnic-minority performers also play Jefferson, Madison, Burr and Washington.
The idea is to suggest that America’s thrust and energy are derived from the talents of incomers irrespective of their origin. This enables the author to dodge some uncomfortable facts. The founding fathers included white capitalists who used black slaves as concubines and labourers.
Presenting Hamilton as an abolitionist is debatable. The show is correct that Hamilton was born out of wedlock in the Caribbean. As a 17-year-old orphan in the 1770s, he sailed from the West Indies to Boston. This supposedly qualifies him as an ‘immigrant’, but at that time the US was a British crown colony, so Hamilton was simply moving from one British dependency to another.
Yet the show’s departures from fact do what all narrative history must do: collect the actions and dispositions of individuals of the past, with some degree of selectivity, for the sake of communicating them to the present.
While Hamilton and Jefferson did not go head-to-head in rap battles during cabinet meetings, they did compete against each other with an animosity that is put forward with clarity in such exchanges. Historians have marvelled how such scenes have immersed the audience in the show’s detailed presentation of the founding period’s complicated politics. Simon Cowan, by email. QUESTION Why is the name Margaret sometimes changed to Peggy? THE first name, Peggy, very popular in Ireland, has its roots in Margaret, and there are two theories as to when and why Margaret got shortened to Peggy.
Margaret itself is a very old name, dating back several thousand years to Asia; it is a variation of a now obsolete word, margarite, which means ‘pearl’ or precious stone. The name Margaret generated all kinds of nicknames, the strangest of which is Daisy, which dates back to the time in medieval England when Margaret was also a slang word for a type of daisy.
But it was much more common for the name Margaret to be shortened, to Maggie, Meggie or Meg. Meg became altered to Peg and Meggie was transformed into Peggy. Meggie and Meg were particularly Scottish nicknames, so it is likely that this transformation took place in Scotland.
No-one is quite sure why the M in Meggie and Meg was changed to a P. At one stage, it was thought that the change came about because of Celtic language influence, but this has been disproved. Whatever the reason, Peggy and Peg became first names in their own right, first of all in the US, and then in this part of the world.
The first variations on the name Margaret were found in England in about 1200, when the name Magge became popular. The shift to Peggy or Peg is said to have happened in the 16th century, when there was a big shift in pronunciation, so that the letters M and P became almost indistinguishable. In time, the spellings of Peggy and Peg became clear, meaning that they had become first names in their own right.
These new first names made their way to Ireland. Some people say that the correct Gaelic equivalent of Peggy is Peighi.
Whatever the reasons for the creation of Peggy and Peg, there is no doubt that these first names became popular in Ireland, especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries, although they are now seen as old fashioned.
Several people in the entertainment industry who became wellknown were called Peggy, such as Peggy Cummins, the well-known actor, who died at the end of 2017, aged 92. Another popular entertainer who was called Peggy was Peggy Dell, the stage name of Margaret Tisdall. Born in 1906, her first performance was at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre at the age of three; the singer and pianist went on to become a popular music hall entertainer. As the music halls went out of fashion, so too did Peggy, but Gay Byrne was responsible for reviving her career in 1973, when he asked her to take part in a Late Late Show special dedicated to the actor Noel Purcell. Her hit turn was leveraged into a career resurgence (including an RTÉ TV show, Peg O’ My Heart) which lasted until her death in 1979.
While Peggy was long a popular girl’s name in Ireland, its antecedents go back many centuries, an example of how a nickname can become a name in its own right.
Anna Murphy, Co. Louth. QUESTION How has Botswana managed to be economically stable and successful? THE earlier answer described how mineral wealth and good governance, particularly by Seretse Khama, the country’s first president, has made Botswana one of Africa’s success stories.
The photograph of Khama, his English wife Ruth and two of their children, Ian and Jacqueline, brought back many happy memories.
I worked in Botswana on a twoyear Crown Agents contract from 1976 as a diesel expert. My duties took me all over Botswana.
I would go to the State House to check the stand-by generator.
One day I heard a female English voice, bidding me: ‘Good morning.’ She introduced herself as Lady Khama.
We had a long conversation until one of her twin sons, TK or Tony, came for her.
I came to know the twins and their brother, Ian, who has followed in his father’s footsteps to become the country’s president.
I remember my time in Botswana with great affection. Philip Roe, by email.