Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

best selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

For today's podcast, we're bringing you an editor's pick, in which a member of our

team chooses one of their own personal highlights from our back catalogue.

Today's episode was the choice of our deputy digital editor, Eleanor Evans.

Eleanor nominated a conversation she had back in 2018, with Ron Churne, author of the biography

of Alcazanda Hamilton that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash hit stage musical.

They spoke just before Hamilton opened in London's West End, and since the episode first aired,

the musical has been released on Disney Plus to a huge global audience.

In this interview, Churne offers some great insights into Hamilton himself, and also how his story

made its way into song.

I'm joined by a prize-winning writer and historian Ron Churne, who's written biographies on

John D. Rockefeller, George Washington, Eulisys S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton, who

we're going to be talking about today. Thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure, thank you.

So Hamilton was a founding father of the United States of America, and is a subject a hugely

successful hip-hop musical, which I'd love to talk about in a little while.

But if we could first go back way beyond the musical, and for those listeners who might not be familiar

with the figure of Alexander Hamilton, he had a remarkable career, much of which I hope we can explore.

He was effectively George Washington's chief of staff during the American Revolutionary War,

during which he also later gained military glory. After that, he founded the Bank of New York.

...