GS1 - Music - Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda) - 2015

In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda opened his musical Hamilton with 'My Shot,' a song in which young revolutionaries in 1776 New York stake a defiant claim to their own futures and to independence. Miranda has said the number took him about a year to write, line by line, because it had to carry the whole show's argument about ambition and self-invention. Beneath the swagger sits the Declaration of Independence's core claim: that people possess unalienable rights not granted by any king, and that governments exist to secure them. When Hamilton and his friends vow to 'rise up,' they voice the Declaration's radical premise that ordinary people may throw off a government that fails them. The song matters because it dramatizes where legitimate authority begins - not in a crown or bloodline, but in the idea that rights come first and government follows, an idea that reshaped how power is claimed and justified.