Hamilton x Hagiography with Shira Lurie

Material Girls

Rehak Hannah

Harry Potter, Books, Vanessa Zoltan, Hannah Mcgregor, Not Sorry, Tv & Film, Aubrey Gordon, Cultural Cricism, Pop Culture, Marcelle Kosman, Witch Please, Feminism, Fantasy, Arts, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're finally talking about Hamilton! It's been ten years since the show premiered on Broadway and that's just enough time to have some perspective on its lasting impact. For this episode, we had to bring on previous guest and brilliant academic, Shira Lurie (who joined us on Witch, Please for Book 7, Ep. 2). As an expert in American History, Shira helps Hannah and Marcelle explore "Hamilton" as a reflection of the Obama era's rhetorical progressivism and political centrism. They discuss how the show leans on the myth of the American Dream and Hannah places the show in the hagiographic tradition of biography. If you love the musical or hate the musical, not to worry! We promise, this episode is for fans and critics alike.

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!

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Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh
0:02.0	Oh
0:03.0	Oh
0:04.0	Oh
0:06.0	Oh
0:10.0	Oh
0:11.0	Oh
0:12.0	Oh
0:13.0	I need a new mind
0:17.0	I need a new brain
0:18.0	I want to take a ride
0:20.0	on a mini train.
0:21.6	You can have it all at the show.
0:25.7	Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist.
0:39.7	I'm Marcel Cosman, and I'm Hannah McGregor, and we are joined today by a special repeat guest, Shira Lurie, pronouns she her.
0:47.6	Shira is a political historian of the early United States with particular interests in popular
0:53.1	politics, protest, and political violence.
0:56.2	Her book, The American Liberty Poll, Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the
1:02.3	Early Republic, was published by UVA Press in 2023. She also thinks, teaches, and writes about
1:09.6	historical memory in public space and popular culture.
1:13.8	We had Shira on Witch Please back in 2022 to talk about historical memory in the Wizarding
1:19.9	World of Harry Potter. But today, we are talking about Hamilton.
	...

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