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NEW YORK CITY – “The Grange” in Upper Manhattan is the only home that Alexander Hamilton ever owned. Standing in front of it, an impeccably dressed elderly man says it’s hard to pin down exactly who Hamilton was. “The one thing he wasn’t, was a politician,” said Steve Laise, an historian and park ranger who serves all of New York City’s national park sites. “But, oh, was he brilliant.” Hamilton’s home, newly relocated after being squished between an apartment building and a church a block away, once was a 90-minute carriage ride from lower Manhattan. Over at Federal Hall, where...

On Thursday's Parker-Spitzer, CNN's Kathleen Parker bizarrely and inaccurately claimed that Alexander Hamilton came to the United States illegally and drafted the Constitution: "Let's remember...a lot of Americans did come through the back door such as Alexander Hamilton. He got off the boat from the West Indies, and all he did was write the Constitution and become the first Secretary of the Treasury." Parker raised this false history during a discussion of Pedro Ramirez, Fresno State University's student body president, who was outed as an illegal immigrant by a student newspaper. After playing clips from Ramirez and his opponent during...

Contemporary American politics is conducted in the shadow of historical myths that inform our present-day choices. Unfortunately, these myths sometimes lead us terribly astray. Case in point is the popular idea that America’s economic tradition has been economic liberty, laissez faire, and wide-open cowboy capitalism. This notion sounds obvious, and it fits the image of this country held by both the Right, which celebrates this tradition, and the Left, which bemoans it. And it seems to imply, among other things, that free trade is the American Way. Don’t Tread On Me or my right to import. It is, in fact,...

Theory of a founding father's African ancestry Friday, July 23, 2004                                              By LAWRENCE AARONAS MUCH as I thought I knew about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, nobody ever told me he was black. Yes. You heard it here first, folks.And you'll think about it from now on every time you take out a $10 bill.Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow is the latest one to explore the theory.I was totally blown away by that information when a friend casually mentioned Hamilton's link to two significant anniversaries - the 250th anniversary of Columbia University, originally Kings College where he was schooled, and...

As Biden speaks at event named for Old Hickory tonight, more appalling stories show party should dump him as icon Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And theyÂ’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina DemocratsÂ’ dinner tonight.But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should...

NEW YORK — Two hundred and eighty tons of American history were on the move Saturday in Harlem. The home of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the country's banking system and was killed in a duel with a political rival, rolled inch by inch down a Harlem hillside to its new location overlooking a park. "This was the only home Hamilton ever owned," said Steve Laise, a National Park Service official dressed in a vest, tie and pants typical of the 1800's. "It represented the consummation of Hamilton's lifelong dream — a successful social position for a man who came to...

NEW YORK - Two hundred and eighty tons of American history were on the move Saturday in Harlem. The home of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the country's banking system and was killed in a duel with a political rival, rolled inch by inch down a Harlem hillside to its new location overlooking a park. "This was the only home Hamilton ever owned," said Steve Laise, a National Park Service official dressed in a vest, tie and pants typical of the 1800's. "It represented the consummation of Hamilton's lifelong dream — a successful social position for a man who came to...

How many things are in a person's pocket that they don't even know about? We take money for granted -- most people can't tell us which way George Washington is facing on the quarter. They can tell us that Ben Franklin is on the front of the hundred, but they can't tell us that Independence Hall (where he helped draft the Constitution) is on the back. One might think that as denominations get smaller and more common, the pictures on them would become more famous and well-known. The ten-dollar bill features Alexander Hamilton on the front. Since he was never...

How New York’s opportunity society became America’sWe New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a century earlier Gotham took center stage as the nation’s first...

Before the Long-Term Capital Management collapse nearly paralyzed the world's capital markets, and before the stock market crashes of 1987 and 1929, there was America's first widespread financial crisis: the Panic of 1792. Today it's a little-known footnote to American financial history. But if it weren't for the quick thinking of a New Yorker named Alexander Hamilton, and his actions as America's first central banker, the events surrounding Wall Street's first bona fide crash could have meant doom for the struggling, cash-strapped republic. Descendants of Hamilton, as well as an ambassador, historians, and grateful Wall Street executives, will gather around...

His face adorns the $10 bill, but as Richard Brookhiser, host of "Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton" (airing on PBS April 11), finds when conducting a quick street canvas -- many Americans cannot identify him. "Washington has a monument," Brookhiser intones. "Jefferson has a memorial. It's often said that New York City is Hamilton's monument." That would be more than enough for any man, yet, as this engrossing film from producer Michael Pack makes clear, it doesn't quite do justice to the genius of Hamilton. First secretary of the Treasury, a drafter of the Constitution, author of two-thirds of the Federalist Papers,...

Last month, workmen jacked up a 206-year-old yellow clapboard house, levered it onto a set of remote-controlled dollies, and trundled it two blocks to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, overlooking East Harlem in New York City. The Grange, as it is called, was the home of Alexander Hamilton, best known as co-author of the Federalist papers and America's first secretary of the Treasury. But this founding father also had an extraordinary role in the infant nation's attempt to come to grips with the curse of slavery. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was one of the most ardent...

Today is Alexander Hamilton’s 250th birthday. Unless, of course, it’s his 252nd. He claimed to have been born in 1757, but there is considerable nearly contemporary evidence that he was actually born in 1755. But there is no argument that he was not yet 50 when he died at the hands of Aaron Burr in 1804. And there is no argument that despite his brief life he had more influence on the future of the United States than all but a very, very few of the Founding Fathers. Hamilton was not like the other Founding Fathers. He was the only...

Peering into spaces that have not seen the light of day for two centuries, architectural archaeologists are dissecting Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, to figure out how to take it apart and put it back together again. The National Park Service plans to move the Hamilton Grange National Memorial from Convent Avenue and 141st Street, where it is so boxed in by neighboring buildings that two of its porches had to be cut off, to St. Nicholas Park, about 300 feet to the southeast. There, it can be reassembled in a form that Hamilton would have recognized, with porches...

When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall, led the pack, at 210. But the Founding Fathers did very well: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington all scored over 150. As the Fourth of July approaches, we'd do well to remember that the Founders were a smart lot, with few gentleman's C's among them. Yet they didn't know everything. They were strongest in law, political philosophy and history--all essential subjects for revolutionaries and statesmen. But another subject,...

Alexander Hamilton was one of the most influential of the United States' founding fathers. As the first secretary of the treasury he placed the new nation on a firm financial footing, and although his advocacy of strong national government brought him into bitter conflict with Thomas Jefferson and others, his political philosophy was ultimately to prevail in governmental development. Hamilton's own career was terminated prematurely when he was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. ~ Early Life ~ Hamilton was born on the West Indian island of Nevis, probably in 1755. Since he was the illegitimate son...

Ben Domenech wonders how early America’s most famous self-made man, who fought by Washington’s side in the revolution, who co-wrote the Federalist Papers, who constructed the country’s financial system, and who was decades ahead of his time in opposing the slave trade ended up on the currency chopping block.Our terrible ruling class can’t even resist farking up our money. Back in 2009, during the height of the Tea Party, there were crotchety old Americans who warned in dark tones about the dangers of this president. He was a socialist, they said, and feckless to boot. He hated the American...

Martha Washington on the 1891 one-dollar bill. I shared my thoughts on the church murders in Charleston and the Pope's encyclical on climate change on this afternoon's Hugh Hewitt show. We'll print the transcript here tomorrow morning. ~The decision to boot Alexander Hamilton off the ten-dollar bill - or at any rate reduce him to one-half of a double-act (like the short-lived Dan Rather and Connie Chung) - is one of those small acts of historical vandalism I absolutely loathe. The powers that be have decided it's time (once more - see right) for "a woman" on a US banknote....

Liberal faux-news site the Huffington Post has declared that our national currency "is in bad need of a makeover." And what better way to celebrate new styles than a one dollar bill with President Obama on it? You may think it's too soon to do such a thing for a President that hasn't even been in office for two years, but HuffPo disagrees. Yahoo!, reporting through the Huffington Post, has praised the designs underneath as "the leading vote-getter" and that is was "an amazing design:"

Rosa Parks should be on the $20 bill, not Andrew Jackson—one group is taking that argument all the way to the White House. Women make up 50 percent of the U.S. population and 85 percent of all consumer purchases, so isn’t it about time we got a face on some legal tender? Women on 20s is a nonprofit on a mission to make a woman on the $20 bill a reality. “This is designed to be a grassroots campaign. We want this to come from the people,” says Susan Ades Stone, executive director and strategist of Women on 20s. “This...