Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I was an NPR producer mixing arts and culture pieces for the radio at the height of the Hamilton craze. Do you know how often I had to listen to music from that show for a few months straight? It was enough to make me never want to think about Alexander Hamilton ever again, which is a shame because the guy had some interesting ideas worth considering.

Take, for instance, his opinions on debt and what debt can do for a country.

Historian William Hoagland has a book on that very topic called The Hamilton Scheme, An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American

founding. And in this conversation with NPR Steve Inskeep, they upend some conventional

wisdom about who has the power when someone lends money to the U.S. government. That's ahead.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors. On our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

The historian William Hoagland set out to write a book about Alexander Hamilton,

a founding father many Americans think they already know.

It's sort of more like, well, he had a marriage, he had an extramarital affair,

he was killed in a duel. Those are big plot points in the long-running musical Hamilton.

Holtland's new book dwells on something the musical mentions, but not in detail. It was Hamilton's plan as the first secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington.

Hamilton was obsessed with the public debt, money borrowed and owed by the federal government.

This is a tricky issue because public debt sounds to us sometimes like, oh, well, that's a problem. To

Hamilton, the public debt was a massive opportunity for kind of consolidating the United States.

Hougland's book, The Hamilton Scheme, describes why Hamilton increased the national debt.

He got the federal government to take over the debts of the original 13 states.

The U.S. took overpaying those loans the states had taken out during the American Revolution.

Rich Americans had loaned much of the money, and Hamilton wanted to bind that wealthy class to

the new nation. And to Hamilton, it was more like, wow, if we can feed that desire on the part of the rich class of Americans to get regular interest payments, not just now, but for years to come, i.e., foster the debt, and yoke that desire on the part of the rich Americans to great national interests,

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